Is RISC-V ready for High Performance Computing? An evaluation of the Sophon SG2044

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the high-performance capabilities of the RISC-V based Sophon SG2044 CPU, demonstrating significant performance improvements over its predecessor and highlighting its potential for HPC workloads.

Contribution

First performance evaluation of the Sophon SG2044 for HPC, showing notable gains over previous models and other architectures, especially at high core counts.

Findings

SG2044 delivers up to 4.91x performance over SG2042 at 64 cores

Support for RVV v1.0 and improved memory subsystems enhance HPC performance

SG2044 narrows the performance gap with other architectures for compute-bound workloads

Abstract

The pace of RISC-V adoption continues to grow rapidly, yet for the successes enjoyed in areas such as embedded computing, RISC-V is yet to gain ubiquity in High Performance Computing (HPC). The Sophon SG2044 is SOPHGO's next generation 64-core high performance CPU that has been designed for workstation and server grade workloads. Building upon the SG2042, subsystems that were a bottleneck in the previous generation have been upgraded. In this paper we undertake the first performance study of the SG2044 for HPC. Comparing against the SG2042 and other architectures, we find that the SG2044 is most advantageous when running at higher core counts, delivering up to 4.91 greater performance than the SG2042 over 64-cores. Two of the most important upgrades in the SG2044 are support for RVV v1.0 and an enhanced memory subsystem. This results in the SG2044 significantly closing the performance gap with other architectures, especially for compute-bound workloads.