Ahead of AMD releasing their Zen 6 EPYC and Ryzen processors in 2026, AMD today saw their Zen 6 “znver6” support land into the GCC 16 open-source compiler.
As a pleasant change since Zen 5 and continuing now for Zen 6, the open-source compiler support is making it out ahead of release… Similar to what Intel could be praised for years over countless generations of getting their compiler support out well ahead of release. With the earlier Zen launches, AMD didn’t post their open-source compiler support until right around launch time or even days after processors were officially launched. This late AMD compiler support was particularly problematic with GCC on an annual release cadence and LLVM/Clang on a half-year release cadence. (Yes, there are bug-fix point releases for potential backports, but Linux distributions don’t typically move to those.) So long story short it was a pain for anyone wanting optimized compiler support for AMD EPYC/Ryzen processors at launch in a released version of GCC or LLVM/Clang. For some past Zen launches, it also wasn’t AMD engineers wiring up the new compiler support but their partners at SUSE. But thankfully now AMD has been moving to get their compiler support out months ahead of time.
Following AMD posting their Znver6 Binutils patch in November, earlier in December AMD posted their Znver6 GCC patch. The compiler patch confirms the new ISA capabilities of Zen 6 including AVX512_BMM, AVX_NE_CONVERT, AVX_IFMA, AVX_VNNI_INT8, and AVX512_FP16.
It’s that GCC Znver6 patch that as of today has been merged to GCC Git. With the AMD Zen 6 support merged now, it will be part of the GCC 16.1 stable release that should be out in March~April. Thus GCC 16 stable will be shipping ahead of AMD Zen 6 processors that aren’t expected to mark their debut until later in the 2026 calendar year.
The GCC 16 support for AMD Zen 6 will be part of the default compiler for Fedora 44 but won’t be part of the default compiler for the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release. It’s not until the Ubuntu xx.10 releases where Canonical moves to that year’s big GCC release and thus still on GCC 15 for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. In any case AMD’s open-source compiler enablement work continues moving in the right direction.
This merge has the initial Zen 6 support. This patch doesn’t yet provide the instruction cost table tuning for Zen 6 processors but hopefully AMD engineers manage to upstream that still prior to the GCC 16.1 stable release.
