Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite GCC vs. LLVM Clang Compiler Performance
Across a variety of different workloads/applications tested, LLVM Clang was competing quite well against GCC as the default compiler on Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64. As mentioned LLVM Clang 20.1 and GCC 14.2 were used as they are the default compilers on Ubuntu 25.04. I was also going to extend this testing to the latest GCC 15 compiler release and newest Clang 20.1 upstream point release too, but thermal issues were holding back additional testing of newer compilers as well as the number of benchmarks executed. The nuisance around benchmarking on the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop was the frequent system resets and shutdowns due to apparent thermal issues with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop on Linux.
From the benchmarks that were carried out, LLVM Clang 20.1 as available on Ubuntu 25.04 was coming out slightly faster than GCC 14.2 for this Oryon CPU testing with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. I'll be back around with more compiler benchmarks and performance tests at large as the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux support continues to mature.
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