The Sophon SG2042 is a groundbreaking commodity 64-core RISC-V CPU that has caught the attention of the HPC community. To determine its potential, we conducted a performance exploration of the SG2042 compared to other RISC-V hardware and high performance x86 CPUs used in modern supercomputers. Utilizing the RAJAPerf benchmarking suite, we discovered that the SG2042 delivers between five and ten times the performance per core compared to other available RISC-V hardware. However, the x86 high performance CPUs generally outperformed the SG2042 by four to eight times for multi-threaded workloads, although there were certain kernels where the SG2042 excelled. This study not only provides contrasting insights into the new RISC-V CPU but also shares performance best practices.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00381