Farewell Intel Xeon Phi: Support Removed In The GCC 15 Compiler

Last week I wrote about Intel aiming to remove Xeon Phi support in GCC 15 with the products being end-of-life and deprecated in GCC 14. While some openly wondered whether the open-source community would allow it given the Xeon Phi accelerators were available to buy just a few years ago and at some very low prices going back years so some potentially finding use still out of them especially during this AI boom (and still readily available to buy used for around ~$50 USD), today the Intel Xeon Phi support was indeed removed.

The Intel Xeon Phi support with the Knights Mill and Knights Landing support in particular is now removed from the GCC compiler. The Intel Xeon Phi GCC support was intended to be used with the likes of OpenMP and OpenACC. In GCC 13 the Intel Many Integrated Cores (MIC) offloading support was already removed.

This commit to GCC Git today removes the Xeon Phi ISA support from the GNU Compiler Collection and lightens the codebase by 4.4k lines of code.

Intel officially discontinued the Xeon Phi line in 2020 and the 10nm successor to Knights Mill was Knights Hill, which was cancelled. Since then Intel has been investing in their Xeon product line and discrete graphics accelerators. Looking ahead most exciting in this area is Intel's Falcon Shores APU/GPU coming out in late 2025.

Used Xeon Phi co-processor cards can be found on the likes of surplus stores and eBay for as low as $50~60 USD but again with the software support being phased out and was limited to begin with, it's a rather poor proposition.

The GNU Compiler Collection 15 release will be out as stable in early 2025. It's also expected that GCC 15 will be retiring the Itanium IA-64 support after that discontinued Intel product line was previously dropped from the mainline Linux kernel.