Clang Fights GCC On AMD's Athlon AM1 APU With Jaguar Cores

A few days ago I did my latest benchmarks of GCC vs. LLVM/Clang and that was using an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" processor. The tables have now turned and in this article are GCC vs. LLVM Clang benchmarks of the AMD Athlon 5350 APU with four Jaguar CPU cores.

The latest Linux benchmarks at Phoronix of AMD's AM1 Platform is comparing the GCC and Clang C/C++ code compiler performance for the Athlon 5350, the highest-end AM1 APU that's a 2.05GHz quad-core. The cross-compiler performance should be very interesting given that the PlayStation 4 uses a Jaguar-based APU and the PlayStation 4 uses Clang as its default code compiler over GCC and other compiler alternatives.

For this benchmarking we used the stock compilers available through the Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr" archive, which provided GCC 4.8.2 and LLVM Clang 3.4 -- the current stable versions of each compiler. The CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS set were "-O3 -march=native" to optimize the generated code performance for this particular hardware. GCC 4.8 introduced AMD Jaguar support while LLVM Clang 3.4 followed with the support. GCC 4.9 will already land AMD Excavator (bdver4) support.

All of our compiler benchmarks are done in a streamlined and fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software for Linux and other operating systems.