Sony Continues Tuning AMD Jaguar Support Within The LLVM Clang Compiler

Thanks to Sony using LLVM Clang as their default compiler toolchain for their PlayStation game console, they continue making improvements to the AMD Btver2/Jaguar code for optimized performance. The Jaguar APU is what's in the current PlayStation 4 while we've already seen contributions from Sony to improve the Zen CPU support ahead of their next-generation console.

Just this week was the newest contribution to the Jaguar/Btver2 target code within the LLVM compiler stack. This most recent addition is fixing the latency and throughput of CMPXCHG instructions. These improvements should yield better generated code around those instructions.

Those LLVM improvements for Jaguar were written by Andrea Di Biagio of the PlayStation compiler toolchain team. Nice to see Sony continuing to push their compiler toolchain improvements upstream.

Last year, long before Sony or AMD confirmed their next-generation console would be based on a Ryzen third-generation processor with Navi graphics, Sony had already been working on Zen target improvements for LLVM. It will be interesting to see what optimizations Sony's compiler team will be able to make there for AMD's benefit.

This week's code improvements and any other commits in the next few months will be candidates for the LLVM Clang 10.0 release due out in early 2020.