GCC & Clang Now Support ARM's New Cortex-A72

Yesterday ARM announced the new high-end Cortex-A72 CPU and today it's supported by the GCC and LLVM Clang compilers.

ARM Holdings announced the Cortex-A72 yesterday as the successor to the Cortex-A57. The ARMv8 64-bit Cortex-A72 is advertised as being 3.5x faster than the Cortex-A15 generation while consuming the same amount of power. The A72 is also said to use 75% less power than the 2014 A15 with the same workloads. The Cortex-A72 uses TSMC's 16nm FinFET+ process. The A72 can be combined with the Cortex-A53 for big.LITTLE designs.

On a semi-unrelated note, ARM also announced the Mali T-880 graphics processor too. The T-880 aims to offer 1.8x the performance of the Mali T-760 while going through 40% less energy. The Mali T-880 is designed to be a great option for 4K displays.

While we probably won't see the Cortex-A72 processor in consumer devices for a number of months given the Cortex-A57 isn't even too widespread yet, LLVM Clang and GCC picked up support for the A72 today. Renato Golin of Linaro added the Cortex-A72 support to LLVM Clang while Matthew Wahab of ARM added A72 support to GCC.