Using GCC version 4.4 with SSSE3 instruction set enabled (if supported by the CPU) may yield up to 10% average increase in binary performance. In certain tests, the results show more than a 20% performance boost (e.g. in multimedia processing).
The table located at http://people.freebsd.org/~mm/benchmarks/perlbench/
shows a comparison of GCC versions
currently available in base FreeBSD system,
GCC version 4.3 and
GCC version 4.4 with various
combinations of CFLAGS
using the perlbench
benchmark suite.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation before
contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.