Scaleway, a French company, has launched “Elastic Metal RV1” bare-metal servers, which are said to be the first RISC-V servers. available in the cloud. These servers are priced at 0.042 euros per hour or 15.99 euros per month, excluding VAT.
In the past, Scaleway launched Arm servers based on the Marvell Armada 370/XP quad-core Cortex A9 processor in 2015, but removed them a few years ago. Currently, they only offer AMD and Intel based servers and hosted Mac computers based on the Arm M1 chip. However, the company has decided to try something new with the EM-RV1 servers based on Alibaba T-Head TH1520 quad-core RISC-V processor, with 16GB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC flash, and running Debian, Ubuntu or Alpine.
scale way shared some benchmark results showing the performance of the EM-RV1 RISC-V server compared to the SBC RISC-V StarFive VisionFive 2 board and some of its x86 instances. In Geekbench 6, it is faster than a server based on a dual-core Intel Atom C2350 processor (Dedibox Start-3-S), but it is still far from the Dedibox Start-1-M based on the eight-core Intel C2750 processor.
EM-RV1 instances are part of Scaleway Labs and are intended primarily for evaluation, but the company also says that the RISC-V server can be useful for testing RISC-V, CI/CD, and AI applications thanks to the 4 TOPS NPU found in each TH1520 SoC. Bret Weber tested Scaleway's RISC-V server and shared his experience setting up an instance with Ubuntu 23.10 (GNU/Linux 5.10.113+ riscv64) and running various benchmarks.
Scaleway RISC-V Server Features
As for the Technical specifications From Scaleway's RISC-V server, the EM-RV1-C4M16S128-A, we have:
- SoC – Alibaba T-Head TH1520:
- CPU – RISC-V Xuantie C910 (RV64GCV) Quad-Core @ 1.85 GHz
- GPU – Imagination Technologies BXM-4-64 with support for OpenCL 1.1/1.2/2.0, OpenGL ES 3.0/3.1/3.2, Vulkan 1.1/1.2, Android NN HAL APIs
- VPU – H.265/H.264/VP9 video de/encoding
- NPU – 4 TOPS @ INT8 with support for TensorFlow, ONNX, Caffe
- RAM Memory – 16GB LPDDR4
- Storage – 128GB eMMC flash
- Network – 100 Mbit/s Ethernet with IPv4 and IPv6
- Chip consumption – 0.96W to 1.9W per core @ ~1.8GHz; Average: 1.3W per core
- Chassis design using laser cutting and 3D printing for the blades
- Price – €0,042/h, €15,99/month
- Operating system – Linux
More information - scale way