Intel Broadwell Support Comes To GCC Compiler

An Intel engineer has published a patch-set providing a new GCC compiler architecture target for Intel's upcoming Broadwell CPUs.

Broadwell is the 2014 successor to Haswell and a patch published on Thursday provides a new -march=bdw option for targeting generated code for the next-generation Intel hardware.

The "bdw" Broadwell compiler support ends up coming down to the same as Haswell (exposed via the "core-avx2" option) but with support for RDSEED, ADCX, and PREFETCHW extensions.

This patch for mainline GCC trunk has been pushed for now to the gcc-patches mailing list.

When it comes to open-source support for Broadwell there has already been the open-source graphics driver code and other Linux kernel improvements for the Broadwell CPUs that will be out in the wild within the next few months.