Performance Comparison between LLVM and GCC Compilers for the AE32000 Embedded Processor

The embedded processor market has grown rapidly and consistently with the appearance of mobile devices. In an embedded system, the power consumption and execution time are important factors affecting the performance. The system performance is determined by both hardware and software. Although the hardware architecture is high-end, the software runs slowly due to the low quality of codes. This study compared the performance of two major compilers, LLVM and GCC on a32-bit EISC embedded processor. The dynamic instructions and static code sizes were evaluated from these compilers with the EEMBC benchmarks.LLVM generally performed better in the ALU intensive benchmarks, whereas GCC produced a better register allocation and jump optimization. The dynamic instruction count and static code of GCC were on average 8% and 7% lower than those of LLVM, respectively.