PathScale Open-Sources The EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite

[Sabre]

Phoronix Article

Within the free software world, GCC has long been the dominant compiler with it being backed by the Free Software Foundation, it being the most well developed free compiler suite, and is a feature rich offering that is put out under the GNU GPLv3. As of late, LLVM has also been hitting the nail on the head. The Low-Level Virtual Machine with its C/C++ Clang compiler front-end offers great performance, is successful in building code-bases like the Linux kernel, its modular design allows the compiler infrastructure to be used in areas like graphics drivers, is under a BSD-style license, and carries numerous other advantages. Other open-source compilers have advanced too, including the release of PCC 1.0. Now there is a new and extremely interesting option to shake the open-source compiler world: PathScale is freely releasing the source to the EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite. EKOPath 4 is a high-performance compiler that up until now has been proprietary and costs nearly $2000 USD per license, but now it's open-source and can sharply outperform GCC in many computationally-intense workloads.
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EKOPath 4 carries full support for the SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, SSE4A, and AVX instruction sets. The run-time is GNU compatible and with the GCC tool-chain, provides optimized C/C++ debugging, excellent multi-core support, provides the PathDB debugger, a PathAS assembler, and supports OpenMP 2.5. The PathDB debugger was previously open-sourced and ported to FreeBSD on GitHub as the Path64 debugger.
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The EKOPath compiler was nearly 40% faster than the GNU Compiler Collection for this ray-tracing benchmark.


Himeno was 2.7x faster with this HPC-oriented compiler over the common GCC compiler.


With the Fortran-written NASA NPB benchmarks, EKOPath was about 8% faster than GCC 4.5.2. Starting to see why this open-source announcement is very exciting?


In the final test of our quick benchmarks, the TSCP chess computational program was 80% faster when built with EKOPath instead of GCC.

Pretty cool announcement. If you do any type of C++ development, this should be very interesting to you.

[ElZorro]

Been way too long since I wrote C++.... :-/

[schvin]

pretty nice stats!