‘World first’: AWS rival launches bare metal servers based on China’s RISC-V CPU and costs just a cent an hour to run – but will it ever regret using eMMC storage?
European cloud provider Scaleway has launched the world’s first range of RISC-V servers in the cloud, in what it says is a “firm commitment to technological independence” in a market increasingly seeking sovereignty over semiconductor manufacturing.
RISC-V is a free and open instruction set architecture developed at the University of California at Berkeley and has the potential to revolutionize the semiconductor industry. Despite being a new architecture, RISC-V already delivers 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 T-Head TH1520 SoC, 16 GB RAM and 128 GB eMMC storage. This Elastic Metal RV1 serverspriced at a budget-friendly €15.99 per month (or €0.042 per hour), comes with a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet network card, including public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and runs on Debian, Ubuntu or Alpine Linux.
eMMC storage
“We are excited to be the first to offer RISC-V servers in the cloud, opening new possibilities for our customers to meet the growing demands for sovereignty, efficiency and sustainability. This innovation is a further step towards our vision of an independent and competitive European cloud,” said Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway.
These servers are compact, with a 52U rack with a capacity for up to 672 EM-RV1s, and are also energy efficient, with a consumption between 0.96 W and 1.9 W per 1.8 GHz core. The handcrafted design features a laser-cut chassis, 3D printed blades and hand-soldered components.
Scaleway says these servers are the result of months of research and development in its Paris laboratories. However, the decision to use eMMC storage can turn out to be a regrettable one. Although cost-effective, eMMC storage is slower and less reliable than other types of storage, such as SSDs. This could potentially impact the performance and lifespan of the server.
Scaleway previously launched Arm servers in 2015 but later phased them out in favor of AMD and Intel-based servers. With the launch of these RISC-V servers, the company is apparently ready to try something new again in the cloud server market.