GCC vs. LLVM Clang On NVIDIA's Tegra K1 Quad-Core Cortex-A15

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 15 May 2014 at 07:30 AM EDT. Page 4 of 4. 12 Comments.
NVIDIA Tegra K1 GCC Clang Compilers

GCC 4.8.2 pulled ahead of LLVM Clang 3.4 when it came to the C-Ray multi-threaded ray-tracer. Over the past few GCC releases the developers have been doing some tuning optimizations that particularly benefit C-Ray.

NVIDIA Tegra K1 GCC Clang Compilers
NVIDIA Tegra K1 GCC Clang Compilers

GCC also had a slight advantage over Clang when it came to the FLAC and MP3 audio encoding performance.

NVIDIA Tegra K1 GCC Clang Compilers

Our Tegra K1 compiler benchmarking comparison ended today with the basic Apache web-server test where the performance was close to the same between Clang 3.4 and GCC 4.8.2.

Overall, Clang performed quite admirably on the Tegra K1 quad-core Cortex-A15 SoC. Generally, Clang was either generating binaries that ran at the same speed as the GCC binaries or better. There were only a few cases of Clang being beaten out by GCC by a wide margin and then of course Clang's current lack of mainline OpenMP support. The 32-bit ARM performance out of LLVM Clang 3.4 is very good, which should be expected given that many ARM vendors in particular have been investing in the LLVM stack. Coming up next when it comes to ARM compiler benchmarks will be tests of built-from-source LLVM Clang 3.5 SVN and GCC 4.9.0.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.