11-Way Intel Ivy Bridge Compiler Comparison

Using DragonEgg with just the LLVM optimizers caused a slow-down in performance.

The plain old GCC continues to do well for x264 video encoding.

The Nero2D performance had regressed with DragonEgg unless using both the LLVM and GCC optimizers.

While GCC may not be as "sexy" as LLVM, for the majority of the results the proven Free Software Foundation compiler performed the best and well ahead of the LLVM-based Clang and DragonEgg compilers. Open64 and EKOPath also were not of any real benefit and did not even produce working binaries for a majority of the test profiles on this Intel Core i7 3770K "Ivy Bridge" system. LLVM's Clang may be useful for its JIT abilities, static analysis support, and debugging features, but when shipping production-ready binaries, GCC is still the leader. This seems to be a view that not only these results show but also from what I hear when speaking with different ISVs.

Stay tuned for the Intel Ivy Bridge compiler tuning article...