Code Sourcery Posts New AMD Radeon GCN Port, Hoping To Mainline For GCC 9 Compiler

There's been AMD Radeon code in the works for the GCC compiler as a new back-end going back years but never really seems to takeoff in comparison to the AMD support on LLVM. SUSE formerly worked on a lot of Radeon + GCC code for GPU offloading while more recent Code Sourcery has been working on a new AMD GCN back-end. The newest AMD GCN code was posted today for the GNU Compiler Collection.

Several months back I wrote about Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics working on a new Radeon GCN port and that's part of what is posted today. The 25 patches posted today by Andrew Stubbs of Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics is for the non-OpenACC/OpenMP bits of bringing AMD GCN3 and GCN5 processor support to GCC. This code out today is good enough for building single-threaded C and Fortran programs for these newer GPUs but C++ is not yet supported either. OpenMP/OpenACC/libgomp offloading will be posted after this initial implementation has landed.

The company is hoping for this new AMD GCN port to land in time for the GCC 9 stable compiler release (GCC 9.1) due out around the end of Q1'2019. It would be great if the C++ and OpenMP/OpenACC support for GCN is also ready in time for that annual compiler update.

This GCC compiler port/back-end is targeting Fiji/Tonga, Polaris, and Vega graphics processors.

The 25 patches can be found on the GCC mailing list where they are currently under review. In addition to needing to clear the technical code review, due to the nature of GCC, this new port also needs to be approved by the GCC steering committee prior to merging.