GCC 8.1 vs. GCC 7.3 Compiler Benchmarks On Five AMD/Intel Linux Systems

With the ebizzy benchmark there was a noticeable drop in performance with the i9-790XE but the Xeon Gold platform had sped up.

As we've come to see from major GCC updates, the optimizations added to increase the performance of the resulting binaries often means sacrificing a little bit of the build time. GCC 8.1 takes just a few more seconds to build the Linux kernel than GCC 7.3.

Here's another look at how the build time performance has shifted with GCC 8.1, when measuring the time to compile PHP.

The C-Ray multi-threaded ray-tracer saw measurable improvements on the Coffeelake and Zen systems while the Skylake systems surprisingly regressed.

The Stockfish chess benchmark saw some performance improvements on most of the systems when compiled by GCC 8.1.