The Potential of RISC-V Platform in Financial Computing on Option Pricing and Energy Efficiency

The fifth version of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC-V) is a popular instruction set architecture (ISA) featured for low energy consumption. Currently, a growing number of industrial applications are based on RISC-V platforms, especially Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Those applications pursue low power and just sufficient computing capacity. However, low power consumption shall not be directly regarded as weak in computation. Recent advancement in RISC- V shows the potential for building a computing platform capable of handling tasks requiring considerable computing power. Traditional financial computing platforms are generally based on Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC), like x86 platforms. As green computing is sweeping, it is meaningful to handle financial computing tasks with less energy consumption. To explore the potential of RISC- V in financial computing, we set up a typical financial computing task - American option implied volatility calculation, and examine the performance and power consumption of x86 and RISC-V platforms. The result shows that the RISC-V CPU is sufficient for some financial computing scenarios considering actual requirements. A heterogeneous computing system composed of x86 and RISC-V platforms could significantly improve energy efficiency.