  Whilst RISC-V has grown phenomenally quickly in embedded computing, it is yet
to gain significant traction in High Performance Computing (HPC). However, as
we move further into the exascale era, the flexibility offered by RISC-V has
the potential to be very beneficial in future supercomputers especially as the
community places an increased emphasis on decarbonising its workloads. Sophon's
SG2042 is the first mass produced, commodity available, high-core count RISC-V
CPU designed for high performance workloads. First released in summer 2023, and
at the time of writing now becoming widely available, a key question is whether
this is a realistic proposition for HPC applications.
  In this paper we use NASA's NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB) suite to
characterise performance of the SG2042 against other CPUs implementing the
RISC-V, x86-64, and AArch64 ISAs. We find that the SG2042 consistently
outperforms all other RISC-V solutions, delivering between a 2.6 and 16.7
performance improvement at the single core level. When compared against the
x86-64 and AArch64 CPUs, which are commonplace for high performance workloads,
we find that the SG2042 performs comparatively well with computationally bound
algorithms but decreases in relative performance when the algorithms are memory
bandwidth or latency bound. Based on this work, we identify that performance of
the SG2042's memory subsystem is the greatest bottleneck.
