4 Impact on the binary performance

Using GCC version 4.4 with SSSE3 instruction set enabled (if supported by the CPU) may yield up to 10% average increase in binary performance. In certain tests, the results show more than a 20% performance boost (e.g. in multimedia processing).

The table located at http://people.freebsd.org/~mm/benchmarks/perlbench/ shows a comparison of GCC versions currently available in base FreeBSD system, GCC version 4.3 and GCC version 4.4 with various combinations of CFLAGS using the perlbench benchmark suite.