With the [1]GCC 16.1 compiler released last Thursday, I have begun running more compiler benchmarks on this first [2]GCC 16 stable feature release. GCC 16 comes heavy on new changes in being the annual feature release and delivering changes from AMD Zen 6 and Arm AGI CPU support to new C++ features and even the Algol 68 programming language front-end. It's also looking quite good in the performance department relative to the GCC 15 compiler from last year.

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For our first look at the GCC 16 compiler performance are some benchmarks of GCC 15 vs. GCC 16 using Fedora Workstation 44 and testing on the HP Z6 G5 A workstation that was recently in the lab for review. This HP Z6 G5 A workstation came equipped with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9975WX 32-core Zen 5 HEDT processor, 8 x 16GB DDR5-5600 memory, and 1TB NVMe SSD.

Fedora Workstation 44 was running during these compiler benchmarks in using the GCC 15 and GCC 16 compilers from the F44 package repository for easy reproducibility and transparency. The CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS set during the benchmarking process were "-O3 -march=native".

GCC 16 compiler benchmarks on more hardware will be coming soon as well as seeing how GCC 16 stacks up against the latest LLVM/Clang compiler. For now let's continue with this initial GCC 16 compiler performance look at the resulting binaries under each GNU Compiler Collection release with the same build flags.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-16.1-Released

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/GCC+16

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=gcc-16-benchmarks&image=gcc_16_fedora_lrg