Recently I came across this benchmark, which although old, but laughable (if you don't know why, I suggest you either readup more about machine code or remain a happy Ubuntu user) because of the inaccurate benchmark method in regards to Gentoo.
Also at this time I just installed Debian trixie (still in testing) for another machine and realized that versions of various applications in their repositories where striking similar. So I decided to to also do a casual benchmark, which although is not that accurate, but FAR more than that phoronix benchmark.
Openssl (higher the better) --
Firefox https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/ (higher the better) --
CPU and real run time of various CPU intensive applications (lower the better) --
xz real and CPU time taken(lower the better) --
bash script benchmark results (lower the better) --
The machine is a Ryzen 5 PRO 2600 -- which is an old machine (x86_64-v3 instruction set). The highest contrast with the benchmark must be seen with newer processors specially x86_64-v4 (avx512) ones because binary distributions (except clearlinux) are optimized for x86_64 baselines which is 3 generations behind the latest. In short you're not fully utilizing your shiny new x86_64-v4 processors unless you use Gentoo. In these matters, even Windows is better off because it's hefty 'minimum requirement' just for running the OS implies they can compile binaries above the baseline x86_64 instruction set.
As of now, I'm not able to get chromium to run on Gentoo because of the GPU of the machine has been blacklisted as per chrome. It works on Intel platform though.
Many of the application may use assembly code. These application perform the same regardless of the of optimization applied by GCC. Common applications include openssl, various video codec libraries, prime95 etc... but I'm not entirely sure how much of assembly they're using; this is the reason why I chose sparsely used algos in openssl for benchmark purposes since the developer is less likely to do efforts for a less used algo.
May applications are not bottlenecked by the CPU, even though it may seem so, that's because they put more stress on the memory speeds than the CPU. Even when the memory is the bottleneck, the CPU utilization is reported as 100% because of how closely the memory and CPU work. e.g. is compression workloads. In these benchmarks, there will not be much of a difference.
imagemagick's compare was able to run on all 12 CPUs on Debian, but only 2 CPUs on Gentoo. As a result, I limited the benchmark to 2 CPUs, however in this configuration, Debian's build of imagemagic took double the time to gentoo's. Because of the large difference I really doubt this is because of the optimization differences between the 2 builds. For larger images, gentoo's build is able to use all 12 CPUs, but since it was taking too much time (for both Debian and Gentoo) I abandoned it.
Package versions of Gentoo --
imagemagick-7.1.1.38-r2
bash-5.2_p37
openssl-3.3.3
firefox-128.8.0
ffmpeg-6.1.2-r1
xz-utils-5.6.4-r1
grep-3.11-r1
gcc - 14.2.1_p20250301 (all packages where built using this version. CFLAGS in make.conf where -march=znver1 --param=l1-cache-line-size=64 --param=l1-cache-size=32 --param=l2-cache-size=512 -fomit-frame-pointer -floop-interchange -floop-strip-mine -floop-block -fgraphite-identity -ftree-loop-distribution -O3 -pipe -flto=1 -fuse-linker-plugin -ffat-lto-objects -fno-semantic-interposition, however a few packages (like firefox) iron many of the CFLAGs out).
Package versions for Debian --
imagemagick-7.1.1.43+dfsg1-1
bash-5.2.37-1.1+b2
openssl-3.4.1-1
firefox-128.9.0esr-2
ffmpeg-7.1.1-1+b1
xz-utils-5.8.1-1
grep-3.11-4
gcc-14.2
The Debian is a fresh install, while the Gentoo installation is from 2009. Over the years, the same installation has been migrated/replicated across multiple machines. Debian was installed on a pendrive while Gentoo was installed on an SSD; of course disk i/o was noticed during the benchmark and only CPU was the bottleneck (there was no i/o wait). All data for the benchmark was loaded from an external HDD (here too disk i/o was not the bottleneck).
For the source of the benchmark download from here. These are it's contents --
script.sh -- The script which was run for the benchmark.
ff-bench_debian.png/ff-bench_gentoo.png -- Screenshot of FF benchmark (which of course the script did not run).
benchmark_results_debian.txt/result_gentoo.txt -- output of script.sh
shell_bench_Result_gentoo.txt/shell_bench_Result_gentoo.txt -- Output of shell-bench.sh on Gentoo/debian.
shell-bench.sh -- Grep and bash benchmark script.
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