GCC vs. LLVM Clang Compiler Performance On The AMD Threadripper 2990WX Benchmarks

Clang 6.0 was noticeably faster than the other tested compilers in the Aircrack-ng benchmark.

The compiler performance is a tight race within the PostgreSQL and Redis benchmarks.

In total I ended up running 47 benchmarks across these GCC and Clang compiler releases on Linux x86_64 with the AMD Threadripper 2990WX. Of the five tested compilers, GCC 7.3 was in first place 16 times (34%), GCC 8.2 in first place 12 times (25%) and then Clang 6.0.1 was in third with wins 19% of the time. GCC is still the fastest in a majority of the benchmarks run, but Clang in most situations is incredibly close to the performance level offered by the GNU compiler toolchain. Only in a minority of cases is there still a very significant difference in performance. This is similar to what we have seen on other AMD and Intel systems to when comparing GCC/Clang on Linux systems.