Apple has been the longtime LLVM stalwart, starting from when they first brought out Chris Lattner from the University of Illinois. There are whole subsystems w

Apple has been the longtime LLVM stalwart, starting from when they first brought out Chris Lattner from the University of Illinois. There are whole subsystems which they've driven such as GlobalISel. However with the M1, Apple has moved wholesale over to ARMv8. Consequently, their efforts are with the AArch64 backend (which they also wrote) and not with X86. Yes, this announcement has to do with the Intel toolchain above the IR layer but I think it signals that they'll be contributing more patches to the X86 backend as well. The X86 backend is upstream, and LLVM owns it. Indeed its named Code Owner works for SiFive. Intel won't be grabbing ownership of it. But I think they'll be contributing more to it. This is a good thing for LLVM.