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

Nick Brown, Maurice Jamieson, Joseph Lee, Paul Wang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of SC'23 Workshops of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis, SC Workshops 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1566-1574
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9798400707858
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Nov 2023
Event2023 International Conference on High Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis, SC Workshops 2023 - Denver, United States
Duration: 12 Nov 202317 Nov 2023

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Conference

Conference2023 International Conference on High Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis, SC Workshops 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDenver
Period12/11/2317/11/23

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • HPC benchmarking
  • RAJAPerf
  • RISC-V
  • Sophon SG2042
  • XuanTie C920

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