GCC vs. LLVM Clang vs. AOCC Compilers On AMD Threadripper

The LLVM compilers were slightly faster than GCC for the FLAC audio encoding performance.

But that was flipped when it came to GCC yielding a faster LAME for MP3 encoding.

GCC yielded a faster PostgreSQL build.

While under the NGINX web server the compiler ended up having little impact on the resulting server performance.

It was a similar story as well with Apache.

Of the 37 benchmarks ran in total on this AMD Threadripper 1950X system running Ubuntu Linux x86_64, GCC 8.1 was fastest for 16 of the tests followed by GCC 7.3.0 in first place seven times. In third was AMD's AOCC 1.2 compiler with four wins followed by the various LLVM Clang builds occupying the rest. To little surprise Clang 5.0.1 was the slowest compiler tested considering it had just the very initial Znver1 support in that release series and since then has been greatly improved.