Intel Xeon Skylake Compilers: Clang Showing Strong Performance Against GCC

Overall, these GCC vs. Clang benchmarks on the Intel Xeon E3 1245 v5 Skylake system were by far most competitive results we've seen to date. With OpenMP support squared away, in the vast majority of the C/C++ benchmarks used the performance of Clang 3.8 SVN was right in line with GCC 5 and generally with GCC 6 too. Meanwhile, Clang continues to offer much faster compile times than under GCC.

These results are very promising for Clang and shortly I will be running similar benchmarks on other hardware to see if this Skylake Xeon E3 system is just lucky with Clang 3.8 or if there's a broader trend now of Clang competing more heavily with GCC over the performance of generated binaries. If you would like to support this testing, consider joining Phoronix Premium.