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

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.