[LLVMdev] A7 processor support?

[Chris Lattner]

On Sep 10, 2013, at 4:17 PM, Alex Rosenberg <alexr at leftfield.org> wrote:
> I know it's quick to ask, but when might support for the new Apple A7 processor appear in tree?
> 
> Is the 64-bit architecture the same as ARMv8, or will we have a much bigger set of changes to contend with?


Hi Alex,

A number of you have asked about the 64-bit CPU in the iPhone 5s, and what that means for LLVM.  The iPhone 5s is based on the ARMv8 / Aarch64 instruction set, but the clang compiler in Xcode 5 is based on a custom LLVM Aarch64 backend, not the one currently on llvm.org.

Apple is committed to contributing its Aarch64 backend to the community (merging it "the right way" with the existing backend), but it was a significant amount of work, and will take at least several months to work out all the details.  I'll keep you posted,

-Chris