Arm Neoverse N2 Support Added To The LLVM Clang 12 Compiler

In September Arm began adding Neoverse N2 support to the open-source compilers initially with GCC and now the support has been merged into LLVM Clang 12 as well.

The Neoverse N2 "Perseus" core was outlined in September as a follow-on design to the successful Neoverse N1. The N2 aims to provide 40% more performance over the N1 for single-threaded performance. The N2 is intended for use from the cloud to enterprise networking devices to edge computing.

Now in addition to GCC 11 having Neoverse N2, the LLVM Clang 12 compiler due out in early 2021 also has support for targeting the "neoverse-n2" processor.

Using "-mcpu=neoverse-n2" implies ARMv8.5-A along with BF16, FP16, I8MM (matrix multiply int8), SVE / SVE2, and other extensions over the base 8.5-A requirements.

The enablement was merged this week for LLVM 12. That compiler update should be out around March while any Neoverse-N2 based SoCs are unlikely to surface until at least well into 2021 at the earliest.