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arXiv · 2504.03774

Exploring energy consumption of AI frameworks on a 64-core RV64 Server CPU

Abstract

In today's era of rapid technological advancement, artificial intelligence (AI) applications require large-scale, high-performance, and data-intensive computations, leading to significant energy demands. Addressing this challenge necessitates a combined approach involving both hardware and software innovations. Hardware manufacturers are developing new, efficient, and specialized solutions, with the RISC-V architecture emerging as a prominent player due to its open, extensible, and energy-efficient instruction set architecture (ISA). Simultaneously, software developers are creating new algorithms and frameworks, yet their energy efficiency often remains unclear. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark analysis of machine learning (ML) applications on the 64-core SOPHON SG2042 RISC-V architecture. We specifically analyze the energy consumption of deep learning inference models across three leading AI frameworks: PyTorch, ONNX Runtime, and TensorFlow. Our findings show that frameworks using the XNNPACK back-end, such as ONNX Runtime and TensorFlow, consume less energy compared to PyTorch, which is compiled with the native OpenBLAS back-end.

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Giulio Malenza, Francesco Targa, Adriano Marques Garcia, Marco Aldinucci, Robert Birke. 2025-04-03. Exploring energy consumption of AI frameworks on a 64-core RV64 Server CPU. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03774

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