GCC 12 Compiler Performance Is Looking Good For Intel Alder Lake

GCC 12 is nearing release in a few months time as the annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection for this Free Software Foundation backed code compiler. On top of new C/C++ language features and various optimization improvements, there is updated tuning for Intel's new Alder Lake processors. Here are some early GCC 11.2 vs. GCC 12 development benchmarks looking at the performance on a Core i5 12600K.

GCC 11 as the stable compiler introduced earlier this year there was the initial Intel "alderlake" target. However, that initial implementation was carrying the exisiting Ice Lake cost table that was not tuned for Alder Lake processors that launched last month. Merged for GCC 12 is that tuned Alder Lake support in place for those compiling binaries specifically using the "-march=alderlake" option.

When the GCC 12 stable release is near in March~April there will be plenty of fresh compiler benchmarks on Phoronix. Today's article is looking at GCC 11.2 stable against recent GCC 12 Git for seeing how the open-source compiler update is looking. The compiler flags were set to "-O3 -march=native -flto" across all of the benchmarking on both compiler versions.

The binaries were built and tested the resulting performance with the Core i5 12600K Alder Lake on Ubuntu 21.10 with the Linux 5.15.7 kernel.