Compilers Mature For Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge, Prep For Haswell

The GraphicsMagick tests rely upon OpenMP, which LLVM currently does not support. However, even so there are some performance improvements to note under the current SVN state of LLVM and Clang.

It's good to see the Intel Sandy Bridge support becoming quite mature within the leading GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers for Linux and also their important roles within BSD and Mac OS X. There's some nice performance improvements to be found by Sandy Bridge (and Bulldozer) owners when upgrading to GCC 4.7 and LLVM 3.1. It's also nice to see the Intel Ivy Bridge support coming together in time for its launch, but in comparison there's only minor improvements over Sandy Bridge that the compiler developers must deal with. The most exciting part of this work is that there is already ongoing support for AVX2 and other Haswell New Instructions while the hardware is still more than 12 months away. Stay tuned for more compiler testing (and some Phoronix Test Suite enhancements) shortly.

For Ivy Bridge on Linux, the open-source Ivy Bridge graphics driver is effectively complete. The Ivy Bridge Linux graphics support has been publicly worked on going back to Q2'2011. I'm expecting the first bits of the Intel Haswell Linux graphics driver support to arrive by early Q3'2012, based upon the timelines of their past initial hardware enablement coverage, Linux distribution timelines, and other information. The latest Linux kernel can also handle Ivy Bridge CPUs well. Ivy Bridge will introduce the new Panther Point chipset, but the Ivy Bridge CPUs are backwards compatible with the well-supported-under-Linux Cougar Point motherboards too. Panther Point hardware should work under the latest Linux distributions, assuming you don't hit any UEFI bugs or the motherboard vendors don't make any shoddy changes at the last moment.

Stay tuned for more Intel Ivy Bridge Linux coverage as the release approaches. If you enjoyed this article, be sure to subscribe to Phoronix Premium or check out the other approaches to help.