LLVM 12.0 Released With Alder Lake + Sapphire Rapids Support, More C++20

After the release cycle dragged on an extra month due to blocker bugs, LLVM 12 was officially tagged on Wednesday night as the latest half-year update to this open-source compiler stack.

LLVM 12 is a big feature release with support for x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels (matching the behavior of the GNU/GCC toolchain), adds support for Intel Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids processors, provides initial support for AMD Zen 3 with "znver3" (though further tuning is still to land), continued work around C++20, POWER optimizations, Clangd is enjoying lower memory use, continued AMDGPU back-end improvements, and much more.

Clang 12 also has improvements around Windows on ARM64, OpenCL kernel language improvements, AVXVNNI / UNITR / HRESET instruction support, honoring of "-mtune" behavior on x86/x86_64, and more.

LLVM 12.0 source packages along with the various LLVM sub-projects like Clang 12, Flang 12, libcxx 12, and more can be downloaded from GitHub while awaiting the official announcement.

More benchmarks of LLVM/Clang 12 as well as comparisons against the upcoming GCC 11 compiler release will be coming up in the days ahead on Phoronix.