Scaleway launches RISC-V servers

https://labs.scaleway.com/en/em-rv1/

by enz • 2 years ago

172 84 2 years ago

labs.scaleway.com

Interesting step, their claim of world's first RISC-V servers available in the cloud is true as far as I know.

I see they list 3 officially supported GNU/Linux distros: Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine. I wonder how mature these are on RISC-V at this point and whether they're ready for production server usage.

brucehoult15• 2 years ago

Much more ready for server usage than desktop usage.

Linux is Linux. It's hard to go wrong when you're not mucking about with graphics cards and first-person games and things like that.

MaxBarraclough3• 2 years ago

For server workloads there can still be plenty of non-trivial architecture-specific dependencies besides the core OS itself, such as the JVM and other JIT-based interpreters.

Python 'pip' packages, which often have native code dependencies, may also lack official RISC-V builds.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 2 years ago

Nitpick: Alpine is a Linux distro, but not a GNU/Linux distro; it uses musl libc and busybox coreutils.

williadc• 2 years ago

This is the first time I've seen the correction go the other way.

MaxBarraclough3• 2 years ago

Interesting, thanks.

arcanemachiner• 2 years ago

Or as I've recently taken to calling it, BusyBox plus Linux.

cpswan2• 2 years ago

Debian support for RISC-V is presently only in Sid (testing release). So not production ready.

When I ask people what it will take to get RISC-V into stable releases the answer is always ‘better access to test hardware’. Hopefully this is a step along the way.

self• 2 years ago

Ubuntu (server) is a lot closer. For example, see the limitations at the end of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V/StarFive%20VisionFive%202

I haven't tried it -- I installed the VF2 Debian fork in April 2023 or so, then switched to SID, and I'm still on that. I think Ubuntu 24.10 will have a lot better support; mainline support for the VF2/JH7110 is almost complete for 6.6: https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan

my1232• 2 years ago

TH1520 with the XuanTie C910 core. Avoid. That particular platform is really incredibly slow, Cortex-A5x level. And with RVV 0.7.1 instead of 1.0 too.

nevi-me2• 2 years ago

I was going to try the server out until I saw this comment. Which alternative board/computer would you recommend one buy?

I'm learning RISC-V assembly with a friend, it'd be great for us to have a machine to tinker with (we'll use ESP-32-Cx for 32-bit).

b9b10eb7364• 2 years ago

Still way better than a VisionFive 2, and more than enough to get your hands in the thing (especially with the hourly pricing). You have to acknowledge that the RISC-V ecosystem isn't as mature as that of ARM64 and AMD64. You don't get the best performance/price ratio with RISC-V (yet). Many extensions were ratified so recently that hardware doesn't even exist (yet).

As far as I'm concerned, the LicheePi 4A from Sipeed which is also equipped with a TH1520 offers a decent value for a RISC-V SBC. If you want more performance than that, it's going to cost you a lot more.

drmpeg3• 2 years ago

On the RISC-V IRC channel, it was shown that there was some bug with the Milk-V Pioneer processor, which is a C920 core. I'm not sure if the C910 has the same issue. The super slow benchmark was:

stress-ng --verbose --metrics --aggressive --atomic 64 --timeout 600

If you try this, adjust the number (64) to match the number of cores on your system.

my1232• 2 years ago

It's not just about a given microbenchmark - that platform just sucks tbh. Hopefully something better appears.

brucehoult15• 2 years ago

Avoid. That particular platform is really incredibly slow, Cortex-A5x level.

If you avoid it then you won't be using RISC-V at all, right now.

Along with the JH7110, it is the fastest RISC-V CPU you can buy off the shelf today. That will probably change late in this year, but for now you can't do significantly better.

Overall the two (and the SG2042, same cores as the TH1520 but 64 of them, plus L3 cache) are very similar in speed. The C910 can be 30% to 50% faster on some microbenchmarks. The JH7110 is usually about 10% faster on system level real world tasks e.g. building software. Not enough to notice unless you sit both side by side.

And with RVV 0.7.1 instead of 1.0 too

Which matters much less than it used to, as gcc 14 can compile C code with RVV intrinsics to either.

Just today I took someone's RVV 1.0 test code, which they'd only been able to run on simulators, and compiled it and ran it on my TH1520 LicheePi 4A, with only Makefile changes (`-march=rv64gc_xtheadvector` instead of `-march=rv64gcv`).

https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1b57gib/comment/kt4t...

b9b10eb7364• 2 years ago

Fully agreed.

The JH7110 is usually about 10% faster on system level real world tasks e.g. building software.

Pretty sure the U74 CPU from the JH7110 is way worse than the C910 from the TH1520 on pretty much all aspects. So my guess is that your metric is mostly explained by the fact that the JH7110 has a PCIe bus which allows plugging in an SSD rather than an eMMC or SD Card. But such SSD also has a cost. I think this gives some perspectives.

unlord• 2 years ago

If you avoid it then you won't be using RISC-V at all, right now.

I'm sorry this just isn't true. The K230 has RVV 1.0 hardware and has been available for 5 months.

Which matters much less than it used to, as gcc 14 can compile C code with RVV intrinsics to either.

This is still a huge problem for fragmentation. Multimedia libraries in FFmpeg and VideoLAN use hand written assembly and only support standards compliant RVV 1.0.

There is no reason to ever produce a binary for RVV 0.7.1, it will simply fail if run on standards compliant hardware.

Kab1r• 2 years ago

eMMC for cloud seems to me like a dangerous proposition. As far as I know, they do not hold up well to write intensive workloads. I suppose you will need to use networked logging.

tux3• 2 years ago

Scaleway was also early in providing Arm servers, it's cool to see them keep bringing new stuff

It's maybe almost too early, given the performance profile of these and the current state of software compat, but the trajectory is definitely there for RISC-V. Wouldn't be surprised to see these compete strongly against ARM servers a few years from now.

crq-yml• 2 years ago

This one is probably more for Scaleway to gain experience than for customers to use seriously.

Of course, that excuse could be true for customers too.

brucehoult15• 2 years ago

The performance is about the same as the first Graviton servers in late 2018.

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

Do they still offer ARM? I remember them killing the ARM bare metal back in the day.

tempest_• 2 years ago

Still seem to offer ampere based vcpus

https://labs.scaleway.com/en/amp2-instances/

freeqaz• 2 years ago

I couldn't find the value, but how much are they charging per month for these boxes? I see they have 4 CPU cores and 16gb of RAM.

tyingq• 2 years ago

  Name CPU RAM Storage Ethernet Network Price excl. VAT/hour Price excl. VAT/month
  EM-RV1-C4M16S128-A 4xC910 RISC-V 64GCV 1.85GHZ 16 GB 128 GB 100 Mb/s 0,042€ 15,99€

mikmak• 2 years ago

just click the link => 15.99€ per month or 0.042€ per hour

theanonymousone• 2 years ago

Does Docker work with RISC-V?

cpswan2• 2 years ago

Yes. I’ve been running it on a VisionFive 2 and a BeagleV-Ahead.

pella• 2 years ago

https://hub.docker.com/u/riscv64

minimal pre-build images ...

brucehoult15• 2 years ago

It absolutely does. I use it every day.

You can run your RISC-V images transparently on your x86 or Arm (e.g. Apple) machines, as docker desktop automatically uses QEMU. Or run them natively in docker on your RISC-V board.

Minimal starter image: riscv64/ubuntu

b9b10eb7364• 2 years ago

I works great (with the usual requirement of having the expected kernel options/modules enabled). The main issue right now is the lack of image support for RISC-V. I hope this is going to change if hardware starts becoming accessible.

fodkodrasz• 2 years ago

100 Mbit/s NIC? Seems a bit thin.

mistrial9• 2 years ago

great for code, terrible for lots of data. maybe not trendy but neither is it fatal?

CuriousCosmic• 2 years ago

For 4 cores and 16GB of RAM? not really. That's probably close to saturation for the hardware for most workloads other than raw data streaming.

The real sell of this hardware is that it's doing this with about 5W of power draw at peak utilisation.

znpy• 2 years ago

Doe these cpus have any cryptographic hardware acceleration? They list gpus and npus only.

I have an old atom-based kimsufi by ovh, cryptography will eat almost a full core when doing file transfer over ssh or any kind of https…

No cryptographic hardware acceleration could really be the Achilles’ tendon for this platform.

Findecanor• 2 years ago

The T-Head C910: no. It is considered a bit of an old core by now. It is open source so it has been adopted a lot.

The RISC-V standard has extensions for both scalar and vector cryptography instructions but yet only a few cores out there support one or the other. Look out for CPUs based on the SiFive P670 which should have the latter. When Android smartphones with RISC-V show up, they will also have vector cryptography.

brucehoult15• 2 years ago

T-Head C910: no. It is considered a bit of an old core by now

Announced in July 2019, it is one of the most recent RISC-V cores you can buy. Hardware takes time, usually 3-4 years to go from announcement of a core to an SBC you can buy.

The C910 is the only RISC-V core you can buy in an SoC with 64 of them (Milk-V Pioneer)

The only newer core you can buy is the C908, available only in the K230 SoC on the CanMV-K230 board. It had some advantages (it's the only board rn with Vector 1.0), but it also has the HUGE disadvantages of being single core and only 0.5 GB RAM, vs quad core and 16 GB RAM on this cloud offering.

Look out for CPUs based on the SiFive P670

This is not available. The first boards are expected late this year.

It will be a huge advance, certainly, with twice the speed per core, and the first SoC SG2380 with it having 16 cores.

But not today.

camel-cdr3• 2 years ago

I'll reiterate what I wrote before:

042€/hour per hour of compute is a great deal for developers. If you tests with cross compilation and qemu anyways and sometimes needs test/benchmark on the native hardware, then this means you can spend about 5€ and you are probably set for months if not a year.

Also, with the latest gcc you can finally target rvv 0.7.1, which is supported by these CPUs. You just write your standardized rvv 1.0 intrinsics and if you add `-march=64gcxtheadvector` gcc 14 will just generate the equivalent rvv 0.7.1: https://godbolt.org/z/va9sfEnMW

justahuman74• 2 years ago

We probably want to encourage people to forget pre 1.0 vectors exists, to ease ecosystem fragmentation

brucehoult15• 2 years ago

That's what the SiFive mafia have been trying to get people to do, for the three years since Nezha arrived with RVV 0.7.1, while they (still!) have zero RVV hardware available for the end user to buy.

It's pure FUD.

The x86 world somehow survives with MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, AVX, AVX2, AVX512. The Arm word has a few incompatible variants too, with VFP, a couple of variations of NEON, SVE, SVE2, MVE.

In comparison, RVV draft 0.7.1 and ratified 1.0 are practically the same thing.

With GCC 14 transparently compiling unmodified code using RVV C intrinsics to either 0.7.1 or 1.0 there is very little cost or reason not to support both.

RVV 0.7.1 is available in the vast majority of RISC-V SBCs in the world today, from the $5 Milk-V Duo (1.0 GHz C906, 64 MB RAM, 256M & 512M available for a few bucks more), to the ~$30 Lichee RV [dock] and MangoPi MQ Pro, to the $120-$180 Lichee Pi 4A, to the $2500 64 core Milk-V Pioneer.

With the sole exception of the CanMV-K230 (single core, 0.5 GB RAM), if a RISC-V board on sale today doesn't have RVV 0.7.1 then it doesn't have vectors at all.

kragen6• 2 years ago

that's fantastic news about gcc

btw possibly you should add a decimal point to your price

zer00eyz2• 2 years ago

For me, the price is 15.99 euros.

For 18 bucks USD I can get the same 100mb, 16mb and 4c/8t of core i5 hosted by OVH cloud (where I have so many upgrade paths it's laughable. I can, if I wish emulate my builds on x86 right here, at home, on my prox mox box or anywhere else I wish and not pay per hour of dev time.

As a small dev, the cost savings isnt there yet. I don't have good RISC-V options at home/office to do testing on.

That having been said, I want the few dev boards that are out there to come down from the 70dollar price point. I love what ESP32 ecosystem has coming out (P4? I think, it has zigbee). So if you have the spare 16 bucks a month, and the TIME to play this might be a good time to stick your toe in!

brucehoult15• 2 years ago

For 18 bucks USD I can get the same 100mb, 16mb and 4c/8t of core i5

It's not about the highest performance or cheapest hosting if you don't care what you're using. It's for those who specifically want RISC-V hosting.

ESP32-P4

Dual 400 MHz CPUs, less than 1 MB RAM.

If you are happy with things in that class, you don't need to pay any $70.

For $5 you can get Milk-V Duo dual 1000 MHz + 700 MHz with 64 MB RAM and run Linux on it.

You can compile C/asm code for the 700 MHz "microcontroller" core right there on the 1 GHz Linux core, if you want. Just put the bare metal binary in the right directory and reboot the 700 MHz core. Use the Arduino library to write your code, if you want, if twiddle the registers yourself.

https://arace.tech/products/milk-v-duo

https://github.com/milkv-duo/duo-arduino/releases

ReflectedImage2• 2 years ago

Can we ditch virtual machines if we are packing 672 servers per rack?

yjftsjthsd-h2• 2 years ago

These aren't VMs?

ReflectedImage2• 2 years ago

One of the main points of VMs is to subdivide servers.

But if we packing low power servers this densely we might not need to.

lewis1028282• 2 years ago

What's the recommended way to learn RISC-V assembly (including SIMD)? For ARM I just found a book I liked and did the exercises on my Mac M1 (replacing system call numbers etc and changing page sizes).

camel-cdr3• 2 years ago

Edit: sorry I missread, I though you were just interested in the vector extension (SIMD)

for the genral assembly there isn't mutch to learn tbh, look at the isa reference card and maybe also look at the B (bit manipulation) extension: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1617/ECAD+Arch/files/docs/...

---

Here are some resources on RVV I can recommend:

RVV spec (also look at the examples in the repo): https://github.com/riscv/riscv-v-spec/blob/master/v-spec.ado...

RVV intrinsics viewer: https://dzaima.github.io/intrinsics-viewer

Tutorial: RISC-V Vector Extension Demystified (3 hour video going over every instruction): https://youtu.be/oTaOd8qr53U

RISC-V Vector extension in a nutshell: https://fprox.substack.com/p/risc-v-vector-extension-in-a-nu...

If you want to see a more complex example/real world application, then you might also be interested in my article about vectorizing unicode conversions: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/articles/vecto...

In terms of development I'd recommend using qemu and a cross compiler, or if you want hardware try to get the kendryte k230 (currently the only sbc with rvv 1.0 support) or wait a bit for better hardware (BPI-F3 and sg2380 should release this year).

kragen6• 2 years ago

i'm probably not a good person to give advice on this, but what i've been doing is installing the cross-compilation gcc environment under debian and qemu-user. this allows me to build statically linked executables and run them as if they were native executables, and also to disassemble the executables and object files with riscv64-linux-gnu-objdump (though it produces incorrect output for instructions like addi and slli, it's good enough to see what's going on)

specifically i installed gcc-riscv64-linux-gnu and qemu-user-binfmt

also i read the risc-v spec and assembly programming manual

i also got some risc-v single-board computers but haven't done anything with them yet

i haven't been doing anything with the v extension, which i think is the most widely supported simd-like extension; though it's not exactly simd, it offers the same kinds of benefits for the same kinds of applications

brucehoult15• 2 years ago

riscv64-linux-gnu-objdump (though it produces incorrect output for instructions like addi and slli

The assembler accepts either syntax:

    user@starfive:~$ echo add a0,a0,13 \; addi a1,a1,420 | as
    user@starfive:~$ objdump -d a.out
    
    a.out:     file format elf64-littleriscv
    
    
    Disassembly of section .text:
    
    0000000000000000 <.text>:
       0:   00d50513                add     a0,a0,13
       4:   1a458593                add     a1,a1,420

Also, objdump will print them as `addi` if you give the `-Mno-aliases` option.

brucehoult15• 2 years ago

If you're already familiar with arm64 assembly language then just read the RISC-V ISA manual. It's short and simple.

https://riscv.org/technical/specifications/

riscv64 Linux syscall numbers are the same as arm64 ones. Just put the syscall number into `a7` instead of `x8`. And args in `a0`..`a3`, obv. Use `ecall` instead of `svc 0`. Boom!

wut42• 2 years ago

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39548179

kragen6• 2 years ago

probably the things that will be most interesting to people:

- SoC T-Head 1520 CPU (C910) RV64IMAFDCV0P7_Zicsr_Zifencei_Zfh_XTheadc 4 cores 1.85 GHz (though i think the v extension on the c910 is the pre-ratification 0.7.1 v extension; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39585519 for more detail)

- 128 GB eMMC

- Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine

- between 0.96W and 1.9W per 1.8GHz core

- €15.99/month or €0.042/hour

mise_en_place• 2 years ago

This looks interesting, I have been meaning to try RISC-V outside of an emulated environment. I have a visionfive board on my desk but gave up trying to figure out how to flash a production OS. There was some shady version of Fedora they offer but I prefer to flash my own via buildroot or yocto.

Luctct• 2 years ago

I wonder what payment methods they accept.

On the site: no information.

FAQ: "You can order your Elastic Metal RV1 server directly on the order page"

click order page:

-> "create an account to view the page"

"I have a question, a problem, what can I do?

Like all Scaleway services, you can contact us officially via our support center, or informally via the Scaleway Community Slack."

click support center:

-> "create an account to view the page"

Scaleway Community Slack:

-> "your browser is not sanctioned by our strikt kompliance kommitat"

You know what, never mind.

niij• 2 years ago

Credit cards and SEPA at a minimum.

k8svet• 2 years ago

And they use Jumio. Instantly noped out after doing a number of other steps to get my account going. I have to verify bank deposits, and upload my ID through that piece of shit Jumio? The brilliant product built by people incapable of understanding that just letting me upload my gd damn ID is easier than trying to get me to complete the flow on my phone.

No. No, actually there are plenty of people willing to take my money. Christ, it's far less of a hassle to get a crypto account opened on a decent exchange. I can't be the only one who just nopes out at stuff like this.

This is on top of the unactionable banner I have that tells me I have a pending contract (I have no pending contract, and no reason I would have one). Okay Scaleway, I get it, I'll move on.

seblu• 2 years ago

We added an FAQ question (https://labs.scaleway.com/en/em-rv1/#i-have-a-question) with a link to the Elastic Metal documentation where you can find the payment methods.

rubatuga• 2 years ago

We are committed to providing you with the best possible experience, but please note that the artisanal design and the youth of RISC-V processor architectures do not allow us to guarantee a specific level of service, resulting in an SLA of 0%.

jononor• 2 years ago

Great option to use as a CI server / job runner if one has a project targeting RISC-V. Of course one could use emulation or put a CI runner on some board in a closet somewhere. But cloud image is convenient, so it is nice to be able to do this now, just as on x86 and ARM.

SergeAx• 2 years ago

These guys are unbelievable. They were the first to provide ARM servers (non-virtual, if I remember correctly), and now this. I hope they are benefitting from those innovations.

Scaleway launches RISC-V servers

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