AMD Lands New CDNA "GFX940" GPU Target In LLVM Backend, GFX1036 Merged Too

AMD developers had a busy day with merging into mainline LLVM for the AMDGPU shader compiler is a new Vega/CDNA "GFX940" GPU target as well as a GFX1036 RDNA GPU target.

GFX1036 I wrote about a few days ago with AMD merging GFX1036 and the related GFX1037 into Mesa for their OpenGL driver. GFX1036/GFX1037 follow the same path and are similar to existing RDNA2-based graphics hardware. However, with the new IP-based enumeration approach employed by the driver, there isn't much more to gain from the early work right now.

This commit adds the GFX1036 target into mainline LLVM.

More interesting is LLVM also seeing a commit adding a GFX940 target. GFX9/Vega continues as AMD's CDNA architecture for accelerators. Presumably GFX940 will be AMD Instinct MI300 series accelerators. GFX940 builds atop Aldebaran with additional features for what will seemingly be called a "CDNA 3" GPU.

Details remain light around AMD's next-generation Instinct CDNA accelerator but it's good to see the support started with the early bits already hitting mainline LLVM for what will be in LLVM 15.0 later this year. Due to AMD's new approach for enabling GPUs in its open-source Linux graphics driver, it will be harder to track overall features guaranteed for a particular future GPU due to the IP-based enumeration, but as always I am monitoring the Git repositories and mailing lists day in and day out. Stay tuned and hopefully more to report on the kernel side come the Linux 5.19 cycle.