Running GCC 4.9 On AMD's AM1 Kabini With Jaguar Cores

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 12 April 2014 at 09:16 AM EDT. 8 Comments
GNU
Using the AMD Athlon 5350 AM1 APU with its four "Jaguar" cores operating at 2.05GHz, I ran some benchmarks from Ubuntu 14.04 Linux comparing the performance of binaries compiled under GCC 4.8.2 and this week's GCC 4.9.0 RC1. Is GCC 4.9 better able to exploit the potential out of AMD's Jaguar microarchitecture? Let's see.

GCC 4.8 brought initial support for AMD's Jaguar and there's no explicitly marked Jaguar improvements for the upcoming GCC 4.9 release, but there's a lot of improvements overall for this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection, so I decided to see how it affects these socketed Kabini APUs. Benchmarks from the other Athlon and Semprons are still forthcoming and on Thursday I delivered some preliminary results when upgrading the Linux kernel and Mesa, for those that haven't checked back since the AM1 Platform launch earlier in the week.
GCC 4.8 vs. GCC 4.9 AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini APU

With this testing of the AMD Athlon 5350 quad-core 2.05GHz APU I compared the performance using GCC 4.8.2 and 4.9.0 RC1 built from source in the same configuration. I then re-built all of the Phoronix Test Suite tests with the same CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS between compiler releases. The testing is quite straightforward and similar to other Phoronix compiler comparisons in the past.
GCC 4.8 vs. GCC 4.9 AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini APU
GCC 4.8 vs. GCC 4.9 AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini APU

Most of the tests show only very minor changes in performance for the Athlon 5350 between GCC 4.8.2 and GCC 4.9.0 RC1.
GCC 4.8 vs. GCC 4.9 AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini APU

GCC 4.9.0 RC1 looks like it's compiling binaries faster though then with GCC 4.8.2.
GCC 4.8 vs. GCC 4.9 AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini APU

See all the rest of the benchmark results within OpenBenchmarking.org's 1404126-KH-GCC48TUNE46.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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