Intel Lands Support For Vector Neural Network Instructions In LLVM

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 21 November 2017 at 05:15 AM EST. 5 Comments
INTEL
Intel continues bringing up support for the 2019 Icelake processors within the open-source compiler toolchains.

It was just last month Intel began publishing more GCC patches that will be supported by their Icelake processors, the successor to the yet-to-be-released Cannonlake CPUs. The GNU Compiler Collection has initial Icelake support for GCC 8.

On the LLVM side, it's a similar story. Intel recently published the Icelake target patch for LLVM/Clang. That's going into LLVM Clang 6.0 that will be released as stable in 2018.

Coming out today in LLVM SVN/Git is initial support for VNNI. The Intel Vector Neural Network Instructions instructions are their addition of deep learning instructions being added to their Icelake processors. It's being treated as part of AVX-512 and initially is the vpdpbusd and vpdpwssd instructions.

With Icelake looking to be more than one year out from release, it's good that there's plenty of time for their Clang and GCC compiler support to mature given the number of new instructions and other changes these CPUs are looking to introduce.
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