AMD's HSAIL Front-End For GCC Might Finally Be Close For Merging

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD's HSAIL Front-End For GCC Might Finally Be Close For Merging

There is finally an update on the proposed HSAIL front-end for GCC for supporting the BRIG binary form of the Heterogeneous System Architecture Intermediate Language...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HSAIL-GCC-FE-Is-Close

[Meteorhead]

I don't quite understand. How does this affect GCC users exactly? This is an HSAIL front-end, which is also mentioned in the follow-up mail list entry, that it is a bit unusual to have a intermediate front-end. So what typical use cases might apply here? Create HSAIL from whatever language/API with whatever tool and convert it to PTX with GCC? (AFAIK GCC does have a PTX back-end which it uses for OpenMP 4.0 and OpenACC 1.0) Or is this just the first step of something else and it's current state is pretty much a demo? Why would I choose GCC as an HSAIL finalizer instead of LLVM? I did not quite grasp the aim of the project.

[bridgman]

You wouldn't convert HSAIL to PTX, you would generate HW ISA directly AFAIK, either CPU or GPU (or DSP etc..).