GCC 9 Compiler Picks Up Official Support For The Arm Neoverse N1 + E1

Earlier this week Arm announced their next-generation Neoverse N1 and E1 platforms with big performance potential and power efficiency improvements over current generation Cortex-A72 processor cores. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) ahead of the upcoming GCC9 release has picked up support for the Neoverse N1/E1.

This newly-added Neoverse N1 and E1 CPU support for GCC9 isn't all that surprising even with the very short time since announcement and GCC9 being nearly out the door... Arm developers had already been working on (and landed) the Arm "Ares" CPU support, which is the codename for what is now the Neoverse platform.

The past several months Arm developers have been working on adding the Ares support to the GNU/Linux toolchain, including the tuning bits and wiring things through with the assembler support and other pieces needed to get the compiler stack in order for their next-gen CPU cores.

Now that the Neoverse N1/E1 has been announced, it was just a matter of adding/updating the branding on the GCC compiler side. As of the GCC 9 compiler code this morning in SVN/Git, -mcpu=neoverse-n1 is available for tuning to the ARM N1 as well as the -mcpu=neoverse-e1. The existing -mcpu=ares option will remain.

The GCC 9 compiler is expected to be released around April with the first stable version being GCC 9.1.0.