GCC 13 Adds RISC-V T-Head Vendor Extension Collection

Being merged today into the GCC 13 compiler is the set of T-Head vendor extensions to the RISC-V ISA. This set of vendor extensions is designed to augment the RISC-V ISA and provide faster and more energy efficient capabilities.

Merged to GCC 13 Git includes initial support for the XTheadBa, XTheadBb, XTheadBs, XTheadCmo, XTheadCondMov, XTheadFMemIdx, XTheadFmv, XTheadInt, XTheadMac, XTheadMemIdx, XTheadMemPair, and XTheadSync extensions. These vendor extensions come from T-Head Semiconductor, which is part of Alibaba as their chip making business unit.

The T-Head RISC-V extensions are designed to provide for faster and more energy efficient RISC-V with these extensions adding new instructions around cache management, multi-processor synchronization, bit manipulation, single-bit instructions, GPR memory operations, multiply-accumulate instructions, vector dot, and more.

The GCC 13 support was merged today across a number of patches for bringing up these vendor extensions. These extensions are documented on GitHub for those curious about these T-Head additions.