GCC 5 Through GCC 10 Compiler Benchmarks - Five Years Worth Of C/C++ Compiler Performance

As part of our end-of-year benchmark comparisons, the latest results are looking at how the GNU Compiler Collection has evolved with the past five years of performance in testing GCC 5 through GCC 9 stable and the latest GCC 10 development compiler from the same system.

GCC 5.5, GCC 6.5, GCC 7.5, GCC 8.3, GCC 9.2, and GCC 10.0 were tested as the latest releases in each of these series. Each compiler was built in the same manner in their release mode. The CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were maintained the same throughout testing of "-O3 -march=native" for testing. Testing went back as far back as GCC 5.x but stopped there due to GCC 4.x build errors being hit on the Ubuntu 19.10 setup used for testing.

An Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system was used for testing rather than a newer CPU in order to rule out back-end/micro-architecture specific optimizations across the tested compilers. Intel Haswell has offered tuned GCC support since before the GCC 5 release. Ubuntu 19.10 was running on this Core i7 5960X system with the Linux 5.3 kernel.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a range of 70+ C/C++ benchmarks were run across all of these tested compiler releases. A similar comparison using LLVM Clang is coming up soon on Phoronix.