GCC 8.1 vs. GCC 7.3 Compiler Benchmarks On Five AMD/Intel Linux Systems
With GCC 8.1 having been officially released last week, I have spent the past number of days running a variety of compiler benchmarks comparing this initial GCC8 stable release to the previous GCC 7.3 stable compiler release. Tests were done on five different Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux systems running very different AMD and Intel processors.
This GCC 8.1 vs. GCC 7.3 compiler benchmark comparison was done when building both out-of-the-box in the same manner (simply with --enable-checking=release --disable-multilib) and then using the respective compiler on each of the systems for compiling the benchmarks and running these test profiles via the Phoronix Test Suite. During the benchmarking process and while the test profiles were being installed with the compiler under test, the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS on each of the systems were set to "-O3 -march=native" for doing an optimized build comparison.
All five systems were running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS x86_64, but that's about as much as was in common with these five distinct systems used for getting an overall view at the direction of the GCC 8 performance. The test systems came down to:
Core i7 8700K - The current-generation i7-8700K Coffeelake CPU that is six cores / 12 threads and the system was built with the ASUS PRIME Z370-A motherboard, 16GB of DDR4, 120GB Intel SSD, and Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card.
Core i9 7980XE - The high-end Skylake-X system with 18 cores / 36 threads, ASUS PRIME X299-A motherboard, 16GB DDR4, and Intel 256GB 700p SSD.
2 x Xeon Gold 6138 - The Tyan 1U server with two Xeon Gold 6138 Xeon Scalable CPUs for delivering 40 cores / 80 threads with 96GB of RAM, and 256GB Samsung 850 SSD.
Ryzen 7 2700X - The new high-end Zen+ CPU with eight cores / 16 threads. This system had the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VII HERO motherboard, 8GB DDR4, Samsung 950 PRO 256GB SSD, and Radeon RX 580 graphics card.
EPYC 7601 - The AMD EPYC 7601 CPU with 32 cores / 64 threads in a single-socket configuration on a Tyan 2U server with 128GB of DDR4 memory and 280GB Intel 900p SSD.
A variety of C/C++ benchmarks were carried out on all five systems with both GCC 7.3 and GCC 8.1 using the Phoronix Test Suite. See our GCC 8.1 feature overview to learn about the changes in this