Benchmarks Of GCC 4.5.0 Compiler Performance

Phoronix: Benchmarks Of GCC 4.5.0 Compiler Performance

Last week GCC 4.5.0 entered the world with improvements to the experimental C++0x support, Graphite-powered automatic parallelization support, compatibility with new ARM processors, Intel Atom and AMD Orochi optimizations, link-time optimization, and GCC plug-in support. Over the weekend we decided to benchmark this major update to the GNU Compiler Collection to see how its performance compares to that of GCC 4.3 and 4.4.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14808

It would be better to build entire system (Gentoo provides great framework for that) with either 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 and THEN test performence of the output code for the whole system built with exact compiler.

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Originally Posted by vermaden

It would be better to build entire system (Gentoo provides great framework for that) with either 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 and THEN test performence of the output code for the whole system built with exact compiler.

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Actually it would be more interesting to see how the performance of the resulting applications is affected by the new gcc optimizations. The build process itself is something you only do once in a while, but if the programs run faster its worthwhile the extra initial build time.

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Originally Posted by screemo

Actually it would be more interesting to see how the performance of the resulting applications is affected by the new gcc optimizations. The build process itself is something you only do once in a while, but if the programs run faster its worthwhile the extra initial build time.

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I meant to build these Gentoo's and THEN compare applications' performance differences, not the compile time or anything like that. ;)

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Originally Posted by vermaden

I meant to build these Gentoo's and THEN compare applications' performance differences, not the compile time or anything like that. ;)

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Oh sorry, we just meant the same thing then :)

@screemo

No problem, maybe I wasnt clear enough ;)

Between GCC releases performance should not improve that greatly on the same command line arguments. Only in earlier releases, GCC did get improvements but as of today the optimizations strategies are well tested and improved. Probably a better test IMHO was between LLVM and GCC 4.5
In fact all the tests are fully supported by GCC like OpenMP and autovectorization support.
Wanna see bigger difference to appear a more interesting article?
Compile with link time optimization s raytracer, or a fortran scientific system. Not that representative for user's software usage?
But testing three compilers under the same algorithm/parameters, will make mostly to not get big gains. The latest problem is that even they will bring 10% speedup, this will not affect regular Linux user anyway, as a lot of applications are not performance critical, and are written in python or bash, or for server based case, filesystem and IO affect much more than the small speedup that a compiler brings.

Good to see C-Ray regression fixed. Oops, but there's a regression BFE now.

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Oops, but there's a regression in BFE now.

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Sorry, I missed one minute edit window... In bullet physics engine.

Very interesting.
I'm curious: was "Graphite" enabled in GCC 4.4/4.5?
(Does Graphite make a difference?)