Verry impressive results. But those results do remind me of the "compiler deathmatch" use the search function to find it. In that deathmatch gcc could be made A LOT faster than the stock settings. Archlinux four example it's using roughly the stock compiler settings. If this new compiler is just by default having all those optimizing things turned on than the current phoronix comparisons aren't even fair..
Just my 5 cents..
Any compiler guys around to tell whether a 2-3x increase like this over latest gcc is considered possible/doable? I was under the impression it's already very good, with icc only gaining 10-30% and visual studio less.
I personally find it very unlikely, which is why I'm leaning towards this being about a cpu+gpu compiler. I haven't seen icc reach anything near 2x against gcc/llvm in my (admittedly few) benchmark tests so I doubt ekopath would be able to generate so much better code as to result in 2x, 2.3x better performance (although it sure would be awesome!). As for Visual Studio, last time I benchmarked it against GCC, GCC generated faster code for Mame atleast (which was the only test I did), but that was VS 2008 though.
Weird that sqlite has problems with -Ofast (assuming that it works with -O3) since -Ofast only turns on -ffast-math and I can't see why sqlite would depend on high-precision for it's floating point math.
As for -Os, it prefers code size over code speed, so unless you are starved for ram I would suggest using -O2 where -O3 causes problems rather than -Os.