LLVM Clang vs. GCC Compiler Comparison On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

When getting access to an assortment of new Intel Xeon E3 "Skylake" processors one of the first testing thoughts that came to mind were some fresh GCC vs. Clang benchmarks. So using the $600+ Xeon E3-1280 v5 processor running up to 4.0GHz, I carried out a comparison of the GCC and Clang compilers using the packaged versions being offered by Ubuntu 16.04, the Xenial Xerus.

For this latest GCC vs. Clang compiler benchmarking comparison on Phoronix was testing the Ubuntu 16.04 packaged versions of LLVM Clang 3.7 (v3.7.1), LLVM Clang 3.8 (v3.8-rc2), GCC 5.3 (GCC 5.3.1 20160222), and GCC 6 (6.0.0 20160125). The default CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS during this benchmarking were "-O3 -march=native" for trying to take full advantage of this server/workstation Skylake processor. Thanks again go out to MSI Computer for lending us the Xeon processors and sending over the MSI C236A Workstation motherboard.

Aside from switching out the compilers as found currently in Ubuntu Xenial, all of the other system hardware/software was maintained the same throughout the compiler benchmarking process. All of these compiler benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and standardized manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.