IBM Begins Posting "PowerPC Future" Compiler Patches For What Is Likely Going To Be POWER11

Just as IBM was posting "future" processor compiler patches in 2019 for what ended up being early POWER10 enablement, they are once again repeating their same compiler enablement technique with sending out "PowerPC future" patches for what is likely to be POWER11.

The "PowerPC future" patches sent out today are just like before -- complete with mentions like "This feature may or
may not be present in any specific future PowerPC processor...Again, these are preliminary patches for a potential future machine. Things will likely change in terms of implementation and usage over time."

The first PowerPC future patches out today are working on extending the Power10 Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA). With the new dense math system, the accumulators are moved to new "Dense Math Registers" (DMR). With these new Dense Math Registers, they are 1024 bits and come with new instructions for working on the new accumulators. This new dense math code is among the new features being put behind the restored "-mcpu=future" compiler target. If it goes like with the POWER10 enablement, IBM will keep posting more "PowerPC Future" patches before renaming the "future" target to "power11" around launch time.

POWER8 came in 2014, POWER9 was introduced in 2017 and POWER10 ended up being introduced in 2021. So we'll see when POWER11 is introduced but in the case of the POWER10 compiler code they began posting the GNU Compiler Collection patches two years ahead of introduction. In any event, it's good seeing IBM continue to work on this early "future" compiler support.

Now to hope that POWER11 firmware ends up being more open-source friendly than the POWER10 firmware mess that has so far led to Raptor Computing Systems sticking to the more open POWER9 hardware...

Today's batch of PowerPC future patches can be found on the gcc-patches mailing list as they undergo code review for possible inclusion into GCC 14.