Is RISC-V ready for HPC prime-time: Evaluating the 64-core Sophon SG2042 RISC-V CPU

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the 64-core RISC-V Sophon SG2042 CPU's performance compared to existing RISC-V and x86 high-performance CPUs, revealing significant performance differences and insights for HPC adoption.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive performance comparison of the Sophon SG2042 RISC-V CPU against other RISC-V and x86 HPC processors, highlighting its strengths and limitations.

Findings

SG2042 delivers 5-10x the per-core performance of comparable RISC-V hardware.

x86 high-performance CPUs outperform SG2042 by 4-8x on average for multi-threaded workloads.

Some kernels perform faster on SG2042, indicating potential for specific HPC applications.

Abstract

The Sophon SG2042 is the world's first commodity 64-core RISC-V CPU for high performance workloads and an important question is whether the SG2042 has the potential to encourage the HPC community to embrace RISC-V. In this paper we undertaking a performance exploration of the SG2042 against existing RISC-V hardware and high performance x86 CPUs in use by modern supercomputers. Leveraging the RAJAPerf benchmarking suite, we discover that on average, the SG2042 delivers, per core, between five and ten times the performance compared to the nearest widely available RISC-V hardware. We found that, on average, the x86 high performance CPUs under test outperform the SG2042 by between four and eight times for multi-threaded workloads, although some individual kernels do perform faster on the SG2042. The result of this work is a performance study that not only contrasts this new RISC-V CPU against existing technologies, but furthermore shares performance best practice.