Monte Cimone v3: Where RISC-V Stands in High-Performance Computing
For HPC researchers and practitioners, this paper provides a performance and efficiency comparison of a current RISC-V processor against established x86-64 and Arm architectures, showing RISC-V's competitiveness in specific scenarios.
The paper presents Monte Cimone v3, a RISC-V HPC cluster using the SOPHGO SG2044 processor, and benchmarks it against Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+ and NVIDIA Grace CPU. Results show the SG2044 doubles single-core performance over its predecessor, achieves 3.08 GFLOPs/W energy efficiency (10x improvement over v1), and reaches 46% and 91% of the performance of Intel and NVIDIA platforms, respectively, when normalized for SIMD/vector length.
The Monte Cimone project provides a RISC-V testbed for High-Performacne Computing cluster. This paper presents Monte Cimone v3 (MCv3), the third iteration of the Monte Cimone RISC-V HPC cluster, integrating the SOPHGO Sophon SG2044 processor, an evolution of the SG2042 used in MCv2. We characterize MCv3 using HPL and STREAM benchmarks coupled with power measurements, and compare it against two reference platforms: the Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+(Sapphire Rapids) and the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip. Our results show that the SG2044 more than doubles single-core performance and improves scalability compared to SG2042. MCv3 achieves an energy efficiency of 3.08GFLOPs/W which improves of 10x w.r.t. MCv1 and is in the range of x86-64 and Arm servers. On pure performance when normalized on the SIMD/Vector length MCv3 on its peak efficiency point (16 cores) achieves 46% performance of Intel Sapphire Rapids server and 91% performance of NVIDIA Grace CPU superchip.