GCC 15 Ends Support For Altera Nios II Embedded Processors

The GCC 15 code compiler that is releasing as stable in the early months of 2025 has removed all support for the Altera Nios II CPU target.

GCC 15 Git a few minutes ago has removed all of the Nios II targeting support within this open-source compiler. Nios II was developed by Altera as a 32-bit RISC-based little-endian embedded processor architecture. The newer Intel-Altera Nios “Nios V” soft processor cores for Intel FPGAs rely on the RISC-V instruction set while Intel/Altera discontinued Nios II in 2023.

The “Nios2” target was deprecated last year for GCC 14 as the architecture was already made end-of-life by Intel-owned Altera. And now for GCC 15 the entire Nios II port is being removed.

The commit removing all of the Nios II target code in turn lightens up the GNU Compiler Collection by more than eighteen thousand lines of code.

Also on the chopping block for GCC 15 was to remove Intel Itanium IA-64 support but this past summer Itanium in GCC ended up being un-deprecated and will hold as long as volunteers continue to maintain the code.