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.
All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.