GCC 8.1 vs. GCC 7.3 Compiler Benchmarks On Five AMD/Intel Linux Systems

With the GNU MPC benchmark, both Skylake (i9 7980XE and Xeon Gold 6138) systems saw a nice performance improvement with GCC 8.1 while the i7-8700K performance was unchanged as were the two AMD Zen CPUs.

While with the HMMer molecular biology benchmark, the i7-8700K was now faster while the Skylake systems had regressed along with the EPYC 7601 performance.

Though at least with Fhourstones we have an example where the performance of the binary improved when built under GCC 8.1 and was without any regressions.

The C-written SciMark2 micro-benchmarks tend to fluctuate a lot with compiler changes, but between GCC 7.3 and GCC 8.1 the results are mostly flat with just some minor changes overall.