> they are finally removing SPE support from GCC(8)

Discussions on deprecating it already in GCC7 started 2 years ago:

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-02/msg00041.html
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2017-05/msg01227.html

The deprecation was then postponed to GCC8:

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2018-04/msg00810.html
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2018-04/msg00102.html

GCC9 is supposed to have it removed completely:

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2018-11/msg00078.html
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2018-12/msg00123.html

As can be imagined, the maintainer of Debian for powerpcspe in general (and Tabor/A1222 in particular) has not been amused about this decision:

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2018-04/msg00107.html
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=81084 (see comments)

The official GCC8 page has this information since March at least:

"The PowerPC SPE support is split off to a separate powerpcspe port. The separate port is deprecated and might be removed in a future release."