GCC vs. Clang Compiler Performance On Intel Meteor Lake

I was running a very diverse range of C/C++ workloads for evaluating the GCC vs. Clang compiler performance on Intel Meteor Lake. In the end I ran 128 benchmarks on the Acer Swift Go 14 looking at the GCC vs. LLVM Clang compiler performance on the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H.

Of the 128 benchmarks, Clang 17 came out in front 78% of the time! This was quite a surprise to see Clang near consistently leading in this Intel x86_64 compiler race.

When taking the geometric mean of all 128 benchmarks, Clang 17 was yielding around 5% better performance overall for the binaries it generated over that of GCC 13 stable. That's where things stand right now in the Clang vs. GCC performance on Intel Meteor Lake. The upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release will be sticking to GCC 13 while on the LLVM side it should be shipping Clang 18 so it will be interesting to see what performance changes are there for that next six-month compiler update.