GCC 14 Compiler Lands Initial Support For Targeting AMD RDNA3 "GFX11" GPUs

AMD makes heavy use of the LLVM compiler infrastructure by their graphics drivers and compute stack while the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has to a lesser extent supported AMD graphics targets too in the context of GPU compute / OpenMP device offloading. That AMD Radeon/Instinct support for GCC has been carried out over the years by Mentor Graphics and other stakeholders. The latest on the AMD GPU expedition for GCC is that the upcoming GCC 14 compiler will finally be supporting AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics hardware.

While the first of the RDNA3 graphics hardware launched in November 2022 and there was RDNA3 (GFX11) support in LLVM long before that in preparing for the driver support, only this week did the "pre-initial" support for AMD GFX11 land within the GCC Git compiler codebase.

Mentor Graphics' Tobias Burnus posted an initial patch for GFX11 support. This complements the existing RDNA2 support (GFX1030) that for GCC is still acknowledged as being "very limited" and not yet enabled by default and considered a work-in-progress. The GFX11 support for GCC is roughly to that same early stage as the GFX1030.

As of yesterday, the AMD GFX11 support for GCC was merged for those interested in this early AMD RDNA3 graphics support for the GNU Compiler Collection. GCC 14 is nearing the end of its development cycle and the inaugural GCC 14.1 stable release should be out in the March~April timeframe with this experimental, early stage AMD GFX11 support alongside many other changes.

Meanwhile over on the AMD side, AMD engineers continue working on GFX12 support for LLVM for what's presumed to be the upcoming RDNA4 graphics processors. Some commits in recent days there to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end have revealed new cache flushing instructions, VDSDIR instructions, and other additions.