Vijay Tatkar's Blog

Tuesday June 30, 2009

How does Sun Studio stack up against GCC on Nehalem
This is one of the FAQs on the compiler front that I constantly get at TechDays, at customer meets, etc. I often point to various benchmarks that Sun Studio has won (and that a World Record means this compiler beats every other compiler in the business and that a system configured this way: with specified HW, OS and Compiler levels is the best in performance that you can currently get today.
I have devoted a few blogs to that effect as well in the past.
Two team members of the Sun Studio organization, John Henning (our SPEC rep, really) and Karsten have now written a paper comparing Sun Studio and GCC on Nehalem systems. Its a must read if you've struggled with this issue in the past. You can find it here and you can post your comments or ask questions at the page as well.
Of course, as has been variously argued in the past ( see this thread , eg ), SPEC doesnt always give the full picture. However, IMO, its a good standby for what you can get out of a compiler. The suite is a broad set of industry-accepted applications that represent significant market segments in themselves. Tuning and extracting good performance isnt just a matter of turning some compiler switches on. You can get good gains by analyzing applications carefully and using compiler tunings to improve their performance effectiveness, which is generally what happens in the case of SPEC applications.
Posted by tatkar ( Jun 30 2009, 10:16:22 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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