European cloud provider Scaleway has launched the world's first range of RISC-V cloud servers, which it says is a “firm commitment to technological independence” in a market increasingly seeking sovereignty over semiconductor production.
RISC-V is a free and open instruction set architecture developed at the University of California at Berkeley that has the potential to revolutionize the semiconductor industry. Despite being a new architecture, RISC-V already offers high levels of performance, making it a viable alternative to established architectures such as x86 and ARM.
Scaleway's RISC-V servers feature Alibaba's TH1520 T-Head SoC, 16GB of RAM, and 128GB of eMMC storage. These Elastic Metal RV1 servers, priced at an affordable €15.99 per month (or €0.042 per hour), come with a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet network card and public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses included, and run on Debian, Ubuntu, or Alpine Linux.
eMMC storage
“We are delighted to be the first to offer RISC-V servers in the cloud, opening new opportunities for our customers to meet the growing demands for sovereignty, efficiency and sustainability. This innovation is another step towards our vision of an independent enterprise and cloud competitive European market,” said Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway.
These servers are dense, with a 52U rack that can hold up to 672 EM-RV1s, and are also power efficient, consuming between 0.96 W and 1.9 W per 1.8 GHz core. The design Handcrafted features a laser cut chassis, 3D printed blades and hand welded components.
Scaleway says these servers are the result of months of research and development in its Paris labs. However, the decision to use eMMC storage can be regrettable. While cost-effective, eMMC storage is slower and less reliable than other types of storage, such as SSDs. This could potentially impact the performance and longevity of the server.
Scaleway previously launched Arm servers in 2015, but then phased them out in favor of AMD and Intel-based servers. With the launch of these RISC-V servers, the company is evidently ready to try something new in the cloud server market again.
