Toward Open ISA Supercomputing: A Comparative Study of RISC-V, Arm, and x86 Architectures on HPC Workloads

arXiv:2610.32632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RISC-V is emerging as a candidate architecture for high-performance computing (HPC), but its competitiveness against established x86 and Arm processors remains difficult to assess because existing studies use different platforms, workloads, and methodologies, and rarely consider energy efficiency. Our work provides an evaluation of contemporary HPC RISC-V, Arm, and x86 processors using a common software stack and methodology. We characterize the Sophgo SG2044 and compare it with the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip and Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+ across four HPC benchmarks (STREAM, HPL, HPL-MxP, and HPCG) and four representative applications (iPIC3D, PLUTO, OpenFOAM, and llama.cpp). The version of HPL-MxP linked to OpenBLAS built and used for this wo