AMD Announces Its IL Code Generator For OpenCL

On Friday AMD released an LLVM back-end for its R600 Gallium3D Linux driver. The LLVM driver back-end was based upon the AMD IL LLVM back-end for OpenCL, which AMD has now separately announced to the LLVM developers as a new source-code drop.

Micah Villmow, a GPGPU compiler engineer at AMD, announced the release this morning of the AMD IL code generator back-end for OpenCL. "I am proud to announce that AMD is Open Sourcing AMDIL Code Generator for LLVM 2.9."

As Tom Stellard mentioned last week when talking about this back-end for the Radeon Gallium3D driver, it's currently just compatible with LLVM 2.9 and not the latest LLVM 3.0 release -- that support will eventually come. "This is the first step of the process, so I know there will be issues that show up. In the next few months, we will be providing more unit tests and an LLVM 3.0 compatible version, and finally a TOT version for inclusion into the tree. I look forward to any constructive feedback and will as answer any questions that I can."

There's also some other initial limitations of this open-source code generator, as talked about in Micah's mailing list message. This code drop will help with AMD open-source OpenCL support.

In terms of the LLVM back-end for the R600g graphics driver, it's being received rather positively (mailing list thread and the forum discussion).