GCC 4.6 Brings Intel Optimizations, AVX, Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GCC 4.6 Brings Intel Optimizations, AVX, Improvements

While no release announcement has yet to hit the wire, GCC 4.6.0 is now available. Uploaded to the GCC mirrors yesterday afternoon was the GCC 4.6.0 final source packages, right ahead of their planned release which is/was expected to be around Monday. It was only earlier this month that the first release candidate arrives, but this is one rather nice update to the GNU Compiler Collection...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTI1NQ

[RealNC]

There's also (finally) Intel Core 2 optimizations for GCC that can be tapped using core2 with the mtune and march options.

Could you give a short explanation here about what you mean? -march=core2 has been working for a long time now.

[RealNC]

Also, it has already been pointed out to you in another thread that it's "-Ofast", not "-0fast".

[birdie]

No matter how I compile unrar with GCC 4.6 the result ends up slower than what GCC 4.5.2 generates.

Not only slower, the resulting binary is larger (just by 4KB, or about 2%).

[XorEaxEax]

Could you give a short explanation here about what you mean? -march=core2 has been working for a long time now.

Yes I reacted at that aswell, maybe he meant that there has been additional optimizations added to core2 by CodeSourcery/Intel which have made it into 4.6. But like you said 'core2' has been available through '-march' and '-mtune' for gcc 4.5.x. In fact when I use '-march=native' on my core i5 machine, gcc 4.5 chooses 'core2' as evident by doing a 'gcc -c -Q -march=native --help=target'.

[FireBurn]

There's a good change you sole GNU's thunder by announcing the release before the project did

[DoDoENT]

I've been running some GCC 4.6 benchmarks versus GCC 4.5.2 along with LLVM 2.9 SVN and the LLVM Clang compiler and LLVM's DragonEgg optimizer for GCC. Those benchmarks should be on Phoronix this coming Monday.

Could you please add ICC benchmark to your results? I've been using ICC recently and I have a feeling that it generates a lot faster code than GCC.
I'm using GCC 4.5.2 and ICC 12.0.2

$ gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.5.2 20110127 (prerelease)
Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

$ icc --version
icc (ICC) 12.0.2 20110112
Copyright (C) 1985-2011 Intel Corporation.  All rights reserved.