OpenSUSE 12.1 Is Set For Release Today, Here Are Benchmarks
The use of GCC 4.6 as the default compiler in openSUSE 12.1 will allow for some performance boosts in select workloads, as highlighted in other Phoronix articles. GCC 4.6 is also what Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 17 use. The LLVM/Clang (v3.0) compiler is available as an option for openSUSE 12.1 users, but it does not yet serve as a viable replacement for most software production cases on Linux.
The disk performance in openSUSE 12.1 is slower. However, that is known as both openSUSE 11.4 and 12.1 are using the EXT4 file-system by default and between the Linux 2.6.37 and 3.1 kernel releases there have been improvements made to the Linux file-system to increase its reliability but at the cost of performance. OpenSUSE will hopefully switch to Btrfs by default in an upcoming release, but for now, it is easily available as an install-time option.