IBM Ready With POWER11 Support "-mcpu=power11" For GCC

IBM compiler engineers are ready to flip-on their POWER11 support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) in wiring up the "-mcpu=power11" option.

The set of patches for wiring up -mcpu=power11 to the IBM POWER11 support has been submitted for GCC with hopes of merging it soon for GCC 15. After some time, they are also hoping to have these patches back-ported to the GCC 14 stable series for a future point release.

The new patches get -mcpu=power11 working ahead of upcoming POWER11 processors. The -mtune=power11 option is also wired up with a second patch but for the time being the tuning information is the same as with current POWER10 processors.

This GCC POWER11 support goes along with recent GNU Binutils support for POWER11 as well. IBM has tested this POWER11 compiler support on both little and big endian systems.

The patches are out for review on the GCC mailing list with hopes of it being merged to GCC Git in the coming days.

POWER11 is the successor to POWER10 CPUs that were announced back in 2020. Public details on POWER11 have remained light besides what I've seen in the kernel, compilers, and other open-source software enablement. But with a recent uptick in POWER11 work for the compilers and kernels, presumably soon we'll be hearing more about POWER11 from IBM.