Closely related: discussion of the Milk-V Pioneer workstation employing this chip [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38553647">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38553647</a>
This particular chip is very slow, so definitely not. However Sophgo are going to switch the cores to using SiFive P670 in the next iteration (SG2380) and those cores have much faster single thread performance.
I don't really get why people are so excited about RISC-V. An open ISA doesn't really offer any additional freedoms to the user. It does not mean we get truly open hardware.<p>This whole thing is just about Chinese companies not wanting to pay for ARM licenses anymore. Which is good for them but I don't get the excitement from tech people.<p>Even if a RISC-V CPU would someday offer the same performance for the same price than an x86-64 counterpart, it would be a strictly worse deal, as software support will be so much worse. The x86 monoculture was an amazing time to live in and helped us enjoy so much backwards compatibility. The promised lower power-consumption might be nice but we will have to see how much the ISA really matters for that.
I think it's amazing that RISC-V is advancing at such a pace that there are already RISC-V cores that are "only" ten times slower than similarly-SotA x86 cores.
Hi all - I'm one of the authors of the paper so thought I would post my thoughts. Firstly, thanks for the interest in the paper - it's really nice to have this sort of discussion. As it's been highlighted in the comments this is a workshop paper (the workshop on RISC-V for HPC last month at SC) which allows us to focus on some of the more practical aspects compared to, for instance, a main-track conference or journal etc. Given the availability of this 64-core RISC-V CPU we felt that it would be interesting to, independent of the manufacturer, explore some of the performance and try and answer the question around how realistic a proposition this is for HPC workloads (I suppose really trying to preempt questions from the HPC community around whether this 64-core CPU moves us closer to RISC-V being a realistic choice for HPC).<p>Obviously the numbers are in the paper so you can draw your own conclusions, but we were pretty impressed by the results overall - both in relation to the SG2042 itself and also more widely what this means for RISC-V. The SG2042 isn't perfect (as has been highlighted here, it only supports RVV 0.7.1 for instance), but my feeling is that it's a significant step forward for the RISC-V community.<p>For the SG2042 specifically, as it's been highlighted in these comments, it is within the same order of magnitude (pretty much anyway depending on which number(s) you look at) as well established x86 high-performance CPUs (and we threw in an old Sandybridge CPU too as a bit of a baseline). I think that's pretty impressive, after all the SG2042 is a first-generation RISC-V CPU from Sophon being compared against mature x86 CPUs. As someone else has said they need to start somewhere and are now building on this as illustrated by their roadmap. Furthermore, something we didn't consider in the paper was price - this is a tricky one as it can depend on where you are geographically with exchange rate etc, but I think that the SG2042 is probably a fair bit cheaper than some of the x86 CPUs we compared against too (when they were new anyway).<p>What I think is pretty phenomenal here is the pace of change for RISC-V more widely. At the start of 2023 the best commodity available RISC-V hardware that we could get was the 4-core VisionFive V2. As we show in the paper, each C920 core in the SG2042 is quite a bit faster for the benchmarks than the U74 in the V2, but also the SG2042 is providing 64 vs 4 cores. This is within the space of 12 months, or so, and there seem to be a whole load of new high performance RISC-V hardware planned for general availability in 2024 (from a range of manufacturers across the globe) including new CPUs and high-core count accelerators (e.g. see the slides of the four vendor talks at the workshop we presented this paper at <a href="https://riscv.epcc.ed.ac.uk/community/sc23-workshop/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://riscv.epcc.ed.ac.uk/community/sc23-workshop/</a> ). So I think it's really interesting to see the trajectory here of RISC-V to date and over the next few years to track whether this pace continues (or even accelerates!)<p>My personal feeling is that unless it unlocks some very significant new capabilities (which to be fair is possible), using RISC-V CPUs instead of a x86 CPUs in supercomputers will probably be a tough sell in the short term. However, I think there is a lot of potential on the accelerator side of things and I suspect this is where we will start seeing RISC-V emerge for HPC initially (and maybe by stealth where people are unaware that their compute or in-network accelerators are leveraging RISC-V in some way).
you don't need a paper from a group of UK developers to understand its performance & potential. The processor is made by a Chinese startup, as China is fighting an all out semiconductor war with the US, there is literally unlimited public & private investments that could be poured into such a 64 cores processor if it is indeed remotely on par with the SOFA of x86. Any Chinese company holding such crown jewel would spend billions of $ on PR to get everyone in China to know its name to further milk more investments.<p>As someone who live in China and has been in the area for decades, the only reason why I have not heard about it until today is pretty obvious - it is a toy implementation no one cares about. There is actually a dedicated term in Chinese describing such junk - “落后产能”, which means backward production capacity.<p>They knew the expected performance, they knew it is going to be laughed by peers in the area, but they still did it for a good reason - to just fool certain low IQ investors in China to get a free ride of the whole RISC-V thing. Whoever behind this laughable release should really be ashamed - what is the next move? glue together maybe 1024 of those 8051 "cores" and claim it has built a supercomputer on a chip?
What's very nice about RISC-V 64bits: code assembly once, run it everywhere, almost quite literaly... no absurdely and grotesquely massive and complex compilers anywhere, no planned obsolescence, feature creeps on computer language syntax nowhere to be found, ultra stable in time, near 0 SDK.
Just realized that the chip is probably backed by Alibaba, it uses the core built by Alibaba, that is the company behind most of those fake stuff sold online. Its founder openly challenged the financial system in China as he argued that his algorithm targets and profits from the poorest more efficiently than transitional banks!<p>Now everything can be explained. What you can expect from Alibaba?