GCC Optimization Level Benchmarks With A 4GHz Intel Skylake CPU On Ubuntu 64-bit

With it being trivial to deploy new benchmark test cases with the Phoronix Test Suite and it being fully-automated, the latest results of our Xeon E3 v5 Skylake CPUs are some GCC reference benchmarks with various optimization levels to see the impact on the performance of the generated binaries as well as build time.

Similar to the other Xeon Skylake benchmarks this weekend, I tested on the Xeon E3-1280 v5 CPU that has a 3.7GHz base frequency with 4.0GHz turbo frequency. The tests were using the MSI C236A Workstation motherboard and thanks to MSI Computer for making all of this Linux testing possible.

These reference benchmarks were done with CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS set to -O0, -O1, -O2, -O2 -march=native, -O3, -O3 -march=native, -Ofast -march=native. GCC 5.3.1 was used as the compiler. For another article I'm doing a direct comparison of all these GCC optimization level benchmarks compared to LLVM Clang 3.8. While not an optimization level comparison, on Friday I did publish LLVM Clang vs. GCC Compiler Comparison On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS using the same hardware.

All of the tests were done on a development build of Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 LTS.




To see all of these compiler benchmark reference results, visit this OpenBenchmarking.org result page. Enjoy! See our many other compiler benchmark articles if you need more explanation or insight.