Intel & AMD are updating the GNU Compiler Collection at practically the same time, preparing both companies for their upcoming releases. Intel focuses on readying Meteor Lake and Sierra Forest, while rival AMD is prepping to release its Ryzen 7000 series CPUs that are part of the company's "Zen 4" architecture.
Intel Meteor Lake & AMD Zen 4 CPUs see further enablement to the GCC 13 suite to prepare the next generation of architectures
Intel continued their patchwork around the 13th Gen Core Raptor Lake architecture in GCC and introduced drivers and support for their 14th Gen Core Meteor Lake series and Sierra Forest processors. Sierra Forest is the company's new fully Xeon E-core-based processor for data centers.
The recent work by the company for Raptor Lake and GCC support surrounded the addition of the "-march=raptorlake" target. Michael Larabel of Phoronix notes that Raptor Lake carries similarities in its instruction set architecture and points out that if developers had replaced "raptorlake" with "alderlake," it may very well display similar, if not identical, results.
The Sierra Forest work in GCC is still being reviewed, but it is anticipated that the process will be completed well before the April 2023 release.
On the other side of the tech giants, AMD has published Zen 4 processor enablement for the GCC 13 in preparation for the company's Ryzen 7000 series processors. The target code, "Znver4," received the "basic enablement patch," but it appears to offer the same command sets as the Zen 3 architecture and is not showing adjustments to any tables, instructions, and more. It is noted that the "Znver3" targets were transferred from that architecture to the new Znver4 target. The target code enablement currently for "Znver4" is for:
- PTA_AVX512F
- PTA_AVX512DQ
- PTA_AVX512IFMA
- PTA_AVX512CD
- PTA_AVX512BW
- PTA_AVX512VL
- PTA_AVX512BF16
- PTA_AVX512VBMI
- PTA_AVX512VBMI12
- PTA_AVX512GFNI
- PTA_AVX512VNNI
- PTA_AVX512BITALG
- PTA_AVX512VP0PCNTDQ
AMD has until before April of 2023 to finalize any current and future support for GCC surrounding the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. AMD is known for focusing on one specific enablement or support for open-source development. Engineers will typically introduce updates and bug fixes more individually than in a large package, causing some drivers and updates to either be delayed or pushed back until the next full release of support packages.
