ARM Cortex-A7 Support Appears In LLVM & Clang

With Cortex-A7 cores appearing in many new ARM big.LITTLE configurations paired with higher-performance Cortex-A15 processors, support has now been added for the A7 to LLVM and Clang.

With an LLVM commit this morning, basic Cortex-A7 support was added to the LLVM compiler infrastructure for supporting the A7's capabilities. There was also a similar Clang commit for supporting the Cortex-A7 by the ARM back-end.

These lower-end Cortex-A7 cores support VFPv4, multi-processing, ARM TrustZone, virtualization, and other features. This Cortex-A7 support missed the LLVM 3.4 window but makes it a feature of LLVM 3.5 in early 2014, which is still good timing considering that ARM big.LITTLE platforms like the Samsung Exynos Octa with A15 and A7 cores are still only starting to appear in consumer mobile devices.