GCC Gains Loongson's LoongArch Architecture Support

The GNU project has announced that its GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) version 12.1 now supports Loongson's proprietary LoongArch microarchitecture. The addition of LoongArch support to a popular set of compilers will enable software developers to better address systems based on the latest processors from Loongson. 

"Support for the LoongArch architecture instruction set has been added," release notes for the new GCC read. "The Loongson CPU codename LA464 and LoongArch 64-bit generic CPU codename loongarch64 are supported through the -march= and -mtune= options (GCC identifiers in parentheses)." 

It is unclear whether the new compiler collection supports all ~2,000 new instructions introduced by the LoongArch architecture, but hopefully it supports those that bring the most significant performance improvements. 

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Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.