GCC 4.9 vs. GCC 5.3 vs. GCC 6.1 On A Debian Xeon E5 Linux System

Given the recent stable release of GCC 6 (GCC v6.1.0), here are some fresh compiler benchmarks on an Intel Debian x86_64 system when comparing the GCC 4.9.3, GCC 5.3.0, and GCC 6.1.0 compiler releases.

From this Debian box powered by an Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 + MSI X99S SLI PLUS, I was using Debian testing and did clean builds of the GCC 4.9.3, GCC 5.3.0, and GCC 6.0.0 for Linux x86_64. Following that I ran a range of primarily C/C++ benchmarks using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite.

The same CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were maintained throughout testing of "-O3 -march=native." All other software/hardware settings were maintained the same during this benchmarking process. In the coming days I'll work on doing a similar GCC compiler benchmark comparison for ARM as well as doing some fresh GCC vs. Clang compiler comparison numbers.