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Single core comparison baselined against StarFive VisionFive V2 running in double precision (FP64), against V1 and SG2042
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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...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... only RV64GC is provided by the SiFive U74, and consequently there is no support for the RISC-V vector extension. Figure 1 reports a performance comparison of the VisionFive V2 and V1 against the SG2042 for double (FP64) and single (FP32) precision. The numbers reported are relative to the performance of the V2 running the RAJAPerf benchmark suite at double precision as a baseline. ...
Context 2
... can be seen from Figure 1 that a single C920 core of the SG2042 outperforms the U74 core of the V2 and V1 at both double and single precision. At double precision the C920 core delivers on average between 4.3 and 6.5 times the performance achieved when running at double precision on the U74 in the V2. ...
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... this means that we leverage vectorisation on the SG2042's C920, whereas this is not supported by the U74 and hence unavailable on the V1 or V2. As described in Section 2.1, the documentation is conflicting around whether the C920 provides FP64 vectorisation, however the results in Figure 1 demonstrate a noteworthy performance difference between FP32 and FP64 on the SG2042, suggesting that in-fact FP64 is not supported by C920 vector operations. By comparison, the performance difference between running double and single precision on the V2 is far less. ...
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... aspect of the results in Figure 1 that surprised us is how much slower the VisionFive V1 is than the V2. Considering that we are running RAJAPerf over a single core only, so the dual vs quad core nature of these machines does not matter, and that they both contain the same U74 core then one would assume that performance should be fairly comparable. ...
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... can be seen from Figure 1 that the performance obtained by a single C920 core of the SG2042 is impressive compared to existing, publicly available, commodity RISC-V hardware. This core is described by T-Head as a high performance RISC-V processor, and the benchmarking results reported in this section demonstrate that it delivers a large improvement in performance across the entire benchmarking suite against the U74 which would previously have been considered the best choice of widely available RISC-V CPU to experiment with HPC workloads upon. ...
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