Radeon "GFX9" Support Lands In LLVM's AMDGPU Backend

Hitting mainline LLVM this weekend is support for AMD Radeon GFX9 within the AMDGPU back-end, not to be confused with the AMDGPU DRM driver.

GFX9 is the architecture of Radeon's upcoming Vega GPU launch. I was surprised to see today that initial AMDGPU GFX9 support landed in LLVM. Besides that initial commit landing AMDGPU GFX9 support was also a few other GFX9-related commits.

But before getting too excited, this is just for the LLVM AMDGPU compiler back-end and we have yet to see the Vega/GFX9 code for the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver or RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. At least seeing this GFX9 code in LLVM be published today, it gives us hope we may see some patches for other areas of the stack soon.

Radeon Vega GPUs are supposed to launch the first half of this calendar year.