Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux operating system is already preparing to ship GCC 8.1 as the default compiler and over the days ahead will be rebuilding all of their packages under GCC8.

GCC 8.1 was released last week and as of today their rolling-release distribution will be shipping GCC 8.1 as the default compiler along with having rebuilt the Linux kernel, Glibc, and other key packages against this major GNU compiler update. They intend to rebuild the whole distribution over the weekend with this new compiler release.

GCC 8.1 as the first stable GCC8 release has many exciting compiler improvements. Intel's Arjan van de Ven wrote on their dev mailing list (all the details on their GCC 8 deployment in that post) that they are excited for the new Skylake instruction scheduling model.

Coincidentally, I am putting some finishing touches today on a five-way GCC 7.3 vs. GCC 8.1 benchmark comparison from Ubuntu Linux and indeed there are big wins for Skylake... Stay tuned for those numbers. With that said, I look forward to running some more Clear Linux benchmarks once the GCC8 rebuild is complete to see how much faster they can make this out-of-the-box already lightning-fast Linux distribution.