  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.
