LLVM Clang 10.0 Compiler Performance On Intel + AMD CPUs Under Linux

PostgreSQL saw a speed-up with the database server built under Clang 10 on the Core i9 10980XE.

SQLite also saw some benefit on the Cascade Lake and Ice Lake CPUs when built by Clang 10.

Cascade Lake with Clang 10 also yielded performance improvements for Nginx and Apache web servers.

In total I ran 72 different C/C++ benchmarks with this Clang 9 vs. 10 comparison. The AMD Zen 2 performance ended up being flat overall even with some znver2 improvements merged this cycle. The Core i9 9900KS performance was also flat given the mature Skylake compiler target. The Cascade Lake and Ice Lake performance is what was most interesting: overall the Core i9 10980XE saw about 4% better performance overall from Clang 10 while the Core i7 1065G7 was up by 1% overall but as shown in some workloads the performance gains of Clang 10 are quite meaningful.

Stay tuned for the Clang 10 vs. GCC 10 benchmarks in April. If you enjoy these compiler benchmarks consider going premium.