GCC vs. Clang Compiler Benchmarks On POWER9 With Raptor's Blackbird

With a few exceptions, in the Cpp Performance Benchmarks test Clang tended to either lead or be at least competitive with the GNU Compiler Collection.

There also wasn't much difference in the POWER9 performance with the Redis workload.

Apache was also in good shape on the three tested compilers.

But overall if looking at the geometric mean of all the test results, GCC on POWER9 was leading Clang by about 20%. It's certainly a sizable difference and contrary to our x86_64 compiler comparisons where GCC and Clang are largely on the same footing. However, Clang receives much more attention on x86 and AArch64 compiler back-ends than POWER9, but at least IBM does contribute to the LLVM stack. Besides the likes of the Raptor Talos II and Blackbird for developing on POWER9 Linux, Raptor does also offer IntegriCloud as a POWER9 cloud / hosting provider.