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

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 23 May 2018 at 11:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 5. 15 Comments.

Given recent improvements to AMD Zen (znver1) with LLVM, the new AMD AOCC 1.2 compiler release, and GCC 8.1 having premiered just weeks ago, here is a fresh look at the performance of six different C/C++ code compilers when testing the performance of the resulting binaries on an AMD Threadripper 1950X system.

For this round of AMD Zen compiler benchmarking the Threadripper 1950X system was used while running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with a Linux 4.17 Git kernel snapshot. The tested compilers in their release builds were LLVM Clang 5.0, LLVM Clang 6.0, LLVM Clang 7.0 SVN, AMD AOCC 1.2, GCC 7.3.0, and GCC 8.1.0.

When building the open-source benchmarks under these six different compilers, the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were maintained the same the entire time of "-O3 -march=znver1" for an optimized compiler configuration targeting the AMD Zen CPUs.

LLVM Clang vs. GCC vs. AOCC - AMD Threadripper

All of these AMD Linux compiler benchmarks from the Threadripper system were conducted in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


Related Articles