Preview: EKOPath Benchmarks On AMD's Bulldozer

Using bdver1 support did not expose any real performance improvement for the HMMer molecular biology test, but overall the Open64 compiler managed a first-place finish followed by GCC 4.7, then PathScale's code compiler, and finally was LLVM-Clang 3.1.

The bdver1 support was of great benefit to all of the compilers with the multi-threaded C-Ray ray-tracer except for LLVM/Clang 3.1. Overall, however, the GCC 4.7.0 compiler on the FX-8150 when building for this Bulldozer microarchitecture performance the best and was well ahead of the three alternative compilers. When targeting bdver1, the three other compilers all produced binaries that were running at about the same speed.

Additional compiler tests can be carried out (or these tests reproduced) in a simple, fully-automated manner using the Phoronix Test Suite. Coming up are also Intel Ivy Bridge compiler benchmarks.