AMD Begins Preparing LLVM For RDNA4 With GFX1200/GFX1201 Targets

As a nice US Thanksgiving surprise, AMD engineers on Wednesday posted their initial patches for adding the GFX1200 and GFX1201 targets to the LLVM compiler.

GFX1200/GFX1201 should correlate to what will be RDNA4 next-generation graphics. GFX10 was RDNA1, GFX10.2 was RDNA2, GFX11 is RDNA3, GFX11.5 is the recently worked on "RDNA3 refresh" support, and now GFX12 is being prepared for what should be RDNA4 graphics. The LLVM patches confirm the GFX1200/GFX1201 targets to be discrete GPU (dGPU) parts.

The initial patches don't reveal any exciting ISA details or other new features, which may be reserved for follow-up merge requests with this work only adding in the initial targets. This LLVM work is needed for the AMDGPU shader compiler back-end that is used by their ROCm compute stack, the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, and other components within the AMD space. Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver meanwhile prefers the AMD-developed ACO back-end that doesn't depend upon LLVM.

In any event it's great seeing the GFX1200/GFX1201 support started for LLVM and goes along with Linux kernel side work on upcoming AMD graphics hardware that's ongoing currently for enabling all of the new IP blocks that will ultimately provide support for next-generation RDNA4 graphics cards.