LLVM Gets ARMv8.4 Enablement, GCC Gets Cortex-A76 Support

It's been another busy week in compiler land for ARM.

First up, the GCC compiler now officially supports the Cortex-A76. The A76 is the new Cortex processor announced back in May for yielding much better performance and efficiency, especially for AI and machine learning.

Thanks to Kyrylo Tkachov of ARM, that support has landed. The Cortex-A76 is now officially supported and targeting this CPU enables ARMv8.2-A with dotproduct and FP16 support. The cortex-a76 is supported for mcpu/mtune options as well as cortex-a76.cortex-a55 if using a SoC where the A76 cores are paired with the smaller A55 cores.

Over in the ARM LLVM space, as of this morning that compiler stack has landed ARMv8.4-A support. This latest ARMv8 revision is now a supported architecture and the LLVM upbringing includes support for the optional new crypto algorithms around SHA3/SHA512 and SM3/SM4. Back in January is when GCC began prepping for ARMv8.4-A.

ARMv8.4-A was announced last year by ARM and includes a Secure EL2 mode, the aforementioned crypto additions, new activity monitors, improved support for virtualization, Memory Partitioning and Monitoring (MPAM), and other architectural improvements.