GCC 5 Brings Some Performance Improvements For Intel Broadwell Systems

My latest Intel Broadwell Linux benchmarks are looking at the performance of the in-development GCC 5 compared to GCC 4.9, the current stable release shipped by many Linux distributions throughout 2014.

With having the ThinkPad X1 Carbon that's powered by the Core i7 5600U Broadwell processor, I ran some comparative benchmarks atop Ubuntu 15.04 to see how a recent GCC 5.0 snapshot compares to GCC 4.9.2 stable. All of the same compiler flags and options were used during benchmarking, all of the open-source compiler benchmarks were facilitated by the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

In case you missed it, earlier Broadwell compiler benchmarks I did compared the stable releases of LLVM Clang and GCC. Non-Broadwell GCC 5 benchmarking I've done in the months prior showed GCC 5 still outrunning LLVM Clang 3.5. GCC 5 is expected to be officially released in April and it presents a ton of new features, optimizations, and other changes as outlined in dozens of Phoronix articles.