ARM Posts Compiler Patches For Their New "Ares" High Performance Core

It's been a few years since "Ares" first appeared on the ARM road-map and it looks like this high performance core might be close to finally shipping.

Ares first came up on the ARM road-map around 2015 when it was presented as a high-end core for servers/enterprise or even large tablets and would be manufactured on a 10nm process and have a power consumption of 1~1.2 Watts per core and based on ARM Cortex-A72. There has been some indications since that this Ares core might have shifted to a 7nm process but public information overall has been light.

Overnight ARM sent out the GCC compiler patch adding Areas. About all that the two patches confirm is that Ares is based on ARMv8.2 and enables statistical profiling, dot product, and FP16 features by default. That's about it for what we know at this stage.

There is also this note on the patches: "Ares is a codename to enable early adopters and in time we will add the final product name once it's announced."

It's a busy time for the GCC 9 compiler with feature development ending and thus a mad rush to land the last minute patches ahead of this stable compiler release due out in early 2019.