News: 0001583361

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

GNU C Library Lands Detection For Intel Nova Lake & Wildcat Lake

([Intel] 11 Minutes Ago glibc Nova Lake + Wildcat Lake)


So far the upstream GCC compiler hasn't seen any target enablement for Intel's future Nova Lake processors (a.k.a. -march=novalake support) but merged yesterday for the GNU C Library was initial targeting for Nova Lake as well as Wildcat Lake.

With Intel recently having published a new ISA extensions and future features programming [1]reference guide , it looks like their compiler engineers are ready to move forward on enabling Nova Lake. As it stands right now in upstream GCC Git, Panther Lake and Xeon Diamond Rapids are the newest processors enabled.

Merged to Glibc Git on Tuesday was [2]this patch for now being able to detect Nova Lake processors. Nova Lake is [3]starting Intel's Family 18 with model IDs 1 and 3.

A separate [4]commit added Wildcat Lake detection too. With Wildcat Lake being a cut-down version of Panther Lake, on the GCC compiler side it should just be able to leverage the existing -march=pantherlake target.

These additions should be part of the Glibc 2.43 release in February.

So far the main Nova Lake GCC patches haven't been posted but they will likely be here soon given the recent updates to the Intel programming reference guide. Kudos to Intel for continuing to land their new CPU support early into the open-source compiler toolchains whild so far on the AMD side we have not yet seen any Zen 6 / znver6 additions even with [5]GCC 16 approaching the end of feature development .



[1] https://cdrdv2.intel.com/v1/dl/getContent/671368

[2] https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commit;h=a114e29ddd530962d2b44aa9d89f1f6075abe7fa

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Nova+Lake

[4] https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commit;h=f8dd52901b72805a831d5a4cb7d971e4a3c9970b

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-16-Stage-3-Next-Month



A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master
noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. "Excuse me",
he said, "may I examine it?"
The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master.
"I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium,
and Hard", said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play,
where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the
human."
"Pray, great master," implored the novice, "how does one find this
mysterious setting?"
The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it under foot.
And suddenly the novice was enlightened.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"