San Francisco; Embedded Systems Conference — (press release excerpt) — Red Hat, Inc. and NEC Electronics announced today certified benchmark scores for the Red Hat GNU C compiler for NEC's 400 megahertz (MHz) VR5500 MIPS-based microprocessor.

The Red Hat engineering team performed a study of the GNU C compiler created for NEC, using a collection of benchmarks provided by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC). These benchmarks represent real-world algorithms used in the telecommunications, networking, consumer, office automation and automotive/industrial businesses. The benchmark tests were then repeated and scores were certified by the EEMBC Certification Laboratories (ECL).

The most significant increase was seen in the automotive industry benchmark. In automotive, the GNU C compiler was approximately 35 percent faster than its nearest competitor. In the remaining benchmarks, the GNU C compiler was approximately 10 percent faster than its nearest competitor.

The study identified optimization opportunities for the GNU C compiler for NEC's VR5500 MIPS-based processor optimized by Red Hat. Because the VR5500 processor has dual instruction issue with out-of-order (OOO) execution, compiler scheduling optimizations are not as critical to execution efficiency as other dual issue architectures that do not support OOO execution. This allowed compiler optimizations to focus on areas other than scheduling to improve performance. The benchmarks were then conducted after the compiler work was completed, indicating a significant performance increase versus other commercially available MIPS-based C compilers in the market.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.