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The GCC has the advantage, that you get it almost everywhere and many programmers design their makefiles in a way as it is the only compiler in the world (on SPARC we have the GCCfss to solve that issue. But the GCC isn´t necessarily the compiler yielding the best results. Stanislav Mekhanoshin shows in Getting The Best AMD64 Performance With Sun Studio Compilers to use the Sun Studio Compiler Suite to get optimized results on a AMD Opteron system as an example. I was aware of the fact, that using GCC on a SPARC system isn´t really a good idea, but the performance wins on AMD64 are nice as well (albeit you should take the results with a grain of salt, as he doesn´t describe the compiler settings of the gcc):

By using the Sun Studio 11 compilers and the right compiler options we've sped up the sed utility from 12 seconds to less then 5 seconds – making it 60% faster without recoding. We now have a version of sed that runs 35% faster than the gcc compiled version

By the way, there is a Linux version of the Sun Studio Compiler Suite. So using Linux isn´t really an excuse for using GCC. And an additional suggestion: Patch you compiler on a regular schedule to get the updates for new processors, for example for the Intel Woodcrest or AMD Barcelona architectures

Interesting benchmark between GCC and GCCfss. GCCffs is a GCC compatible frontend with Sun Studio backend. Up to 65% more floating point performance gives you a nice boost in your applications. You should give it a try.