The emergence of a new, open, and free instruction set architecture, RISC-V, has heralded a new era in microprocessor architectures. Starting with low-power, low-performance prototypes, the RISC-V community has a good chance of moving towards fully functional high-end microprocessors suitable for high-performance computing. Achieving progress in this direction requires comprehensive development of the software environment, namely operating systems, compilers, mathematical libraries, and approaches to performance analysis and optimization. In this paper, we analyze the performance of two available RISC-V devices when executing three memory-bound applications: a widely used STREAM benchmark, an in-place dense matrix transposition algorithm, and a Gaussian Blur algorithm. We show that, compared to x86 and ARM CPUs, RISC-V devices are still expected to be inferior in terms of computation time but are very good in resource utilization. We also demonstrate that well-developed memory optimization techniques for x86 CPUs improve the performance on RISC-V CPUs. Overall, the paper shows the potential of RISC-V as an alternative architecture for high-performance computing.

翻译：一种新的开放且免费的指令集架构RISC-V的出现，开启了微处理器架构的新纪元。从低功耗、低性能的原型起步，RISC-V社区有望向适用于高性能计算的完整高端微处理器迈进。在此方向上取得进展需要全面开发生态软件环境，包括操作系统、编译器、数学库以及性能分析与优化方法。本文分析了两种现有RISC-V设备在运行三类内存受限型应用时的性能表现：广泛使用的STREAM基准测试、原地稠密矩阵转置算法以及高斯模糊算法。研究表明，与x86和ARM CPU相比，RISC-V设备在计算时间方面仍显不足，但在资源利用效率上表现优异。同时，本文证实了针对x86 CPU发展成熟的存储器优化技术能够提升RISC-V CPU的性能。总体而言，本文展示了RISC-V作为高性能计算替代架构的潜力。