The Performance Of Clear Linux With GCC 8
Intel's Clear Linux operating system has been among the first notable Linux distributions upgrading to the recently-released GCC 8.1 as the default system compiler and then proceeding to rebuild its packages against this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection. Here are some before/after benchmarks of their GCC 8 deployment for those interested.
GCC 8 offers many compiler improvements from tentative C17 and C++20/C++2A support to newer CPU support and performance optimizations. In fact, our tests have found for some significant compiler boosts on Intel Skylake hardware but there are also benefits for AMD Ryzen and other CPU microarchitectures.
Our tests of GCC 8 has been building it from source on Ubuntu up until now, but here are some tests done when comparing Clear Linux 22280 from one week ago to Clear Linux 22350 from yesterday. The biggest change to that rolling-release distribution in the past week was moving from GCC 7.3.0 to GCC 8.1.0 as the default system compiler.
These before/after Clear Linux tests with GCC 8 were done on seven different systems including with an Intel Pentium G4400, Core i5 6500, Core i7 7700K, Xeon E3-1235L v5, Xeon E3-1245 v5, Xeon E3-1260L v5, and Xeon Silver 4108.
All of these Clear Linux benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated manner using the Phoronix Test Suite for looking at how this operating system's performance changed over the past week with GCC 8. Clear's default compiler options and other default settings were used throughout the benchmarking process.