AMD & Others Are Working On The LLVM SPIR-V Converter

Written by Michael Larabel in LLVM on 25 May 2015 at 08:38 AM EDT. 17 Comments
LLVM
AMD is among the companies working on adding a reader/writer for SPIR-V within LLVM.

SPIR-V, the new intermediate representation used by OpenCL 2.1 and Vulkan is very promising. Since its public announcement, there's been talk of having a SPIR-V converter to take the IR and transform it to/from LLVM IR, which would allow this critical part of new Vulkan drivers to be used with existing LLVM back-ends and potentially other use-cases with adapting LLVM tooling to GPUs and other SPIR-V clients.

For the past two weeks or so, Yaxun Liu of AMD has been leading the charge to evaluate upstream LLVM interest in the new Khronos Group IR and to see where it might fit into the LLVM equation. So far this public mailing list thread has drawn interest from Google, Khronos members, and other companies, including Apple.

There isn't a SPIR-V reader/writer for LLVM yet but it looks like it's getting closer to becoming a reality. SPIR-V remains in pre-1.0 form but it's expected it will be finalized along with the public Vulkan specification in what's widely expected to be a SIGGRAPH launch in August.

Those wanting to monitor the LLVM SPIR-V discussions can follow this mailing list thread.
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