LLVM/Clang 9.0 Picks Up Support For Arm's Cortex-A76

For those interested in Arm's Cortex-A76 that was announced last year, this CPU with "desktop-class performance with smartphone efficiency" is now supported by the LLVM Clang compiler.

As of this Clang commit and this LLVM commit on Monday, there is back-end support now wired up for the Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A76AE. With the cortex-a76 and cortex-a76ae values for -mcpu=, the Clang compiler can generate optimized machine code for this Arm CPU.

Adding the new Cortex-A76/A76AE CPU support happened for the LLVM Clang 9.0 release due out this fall, not the imminent LLVM Clang 8.0 release.

According to Arm, the Cortex-A76 offers 40% better power efficiency and 35% better performance over the Cortex-A75.

GCC meanwhile has offered Cortex-A76 support since last year's development code that will be found in the soon-to-be-released GCC 9.1.