Apple M2 Support Added To Upstream LLVM Along With The A15, A16

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple M2 Support Added To Upstream LLVM Along With The A15, A16

Upstream LLVM has added the compiler CPU targets for the Apple M2, A15, and A16 SoCs...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Apple-M2-Target

[rafanelli]

If this was not in LLVM already, how does Apple compile software for these chips? They use LLVM too right? Do they have private branches? Or another compiler?

[NeoMorpheus]

Its Apple helping these people in any way, shape or form?

If not, they are really geniuses to be able to do all that with almost zero documentation.

[rafanelli]

Thought LLVM was much sponsored by Apple (some say they do not like to have GPL code in their tooling).

[jabl]

Its Apple helping these people in any way, shape or form?

If not, they are really geniuses to be able to do all that with almost zero documentation.

Literally the second sentence in the article you're commenting on (emphasis added):

Apple compiler engineer Tim Northover has contributed the Apple M2 / A15 / A16 CPU targets to the upstream code-base for LLVM/Clang.

[tildearrow]

If this was not in LLVM already, how does Apple compile software for these chips? They use LLVM too right? Do they have private branches? Or another compiler?

"Private branches" might be the correct one.
AppleClang is slightly different from open-source Clang.

[brad0]

If this was not in LLVM already, how does Apple compile software for these chips? They use LLVM too right? Do they have private branches? Or another compiler?

They have a private fork just as many others do, same goes for others with GCC, but even with that being the case these "support" diffs are always implied to have a lot more of an impact than they do. It wouldn't stop Apple from supporting these systems. The base ISA is what matters.

[rene]

Its Apple helping these people in any way, shape or form?

If not, they are really geniuses to be able to do all that with almost zero documentation.

does not exactly require a genius adding some cpu names and their publicly known supported ISA set to an processor model table, ...

[brad0]

Thought LLVM was much sponsored by Apple (some say they do not like to have GPL code in their tooling).

They very much do. Apple created Clang. (That is the case and is so for others, but in Apple's case it goes much deeper than that).

[brad0]

Literally the second sentence in the article you're commenting on (emphasis added):

People do not read nowadays.