GCC 9.0 Compiler Benchmarks Against GCC7/GCC8 At The End Of 2018

In early 2019 we will see the first stable release of GCC 9 as the annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection that is bringing the D language front-end, more C2X and C++ additions, various microarchitecture optimizations from better Znver1 support to Icelake, and a range of other additions we'll provide a convenient recap of shortly. But for those wondering how the GCC 9 performance is looking, here are some fresh benchmarks when benchmarking the latest daily GCC 9.0 compiler against GCC 7.4 and GCC 8.2 atop Clear Linux using an Intel Core i9 7980XE Skylake-X system.

Similar to the few other tests we've done at different times throughout the years and on different hardware, this article is a last look as we end out 2018 to see how the GCC9 performance is looking on Intel x86_64 compared to the past two major releases. When the formal GCC 9.1.0 compiler release nears its debut around the end of Q1-2019, I'll be back with plenty more compiler benchmarks on different CPUs. Of course, there will also be benchmarks of the upcoming LLVM Clang 8.0 release that should be out roughly around the same time as GCC9 stable.

All of this testing was done when building GCC 7.4 / 8.2 / 9.0 from source on Clear Linux and the compiler releases configured using "--disable-multilib --enable-checking=release" and keeping the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS the same throughout building all of the open-source benchmarks used for evaluating the performance of the resulting binaries. Going back further than GCC 7 was not possible on this system due to Glibc issues. The Phoronix Test Suite was used for automating this process, as always.