Benchmarking The First RISC-V Cloud Server: Scaleway EM-RV1 Performance
Scaleway by way of their Scaleway Labs group recently launched the Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1) as the world's first RISC-V servers available in the cloud. These RISC-V cloud servers are built around the T-Head 1520 SoC and are an interesting way to explore the RISC-V architecture and/or otherwise make use of RISC-V for CI/CD deployments or other testing purposes. In this article are some benchmarks showing the RISC-V EM-RV1 performance against Intel and AMD x86_64 Linux.
Before getting too excited over RISC-V cloud servers, it's important to first take note of the specs: the T-Head 1520 SoC used provides 4 RISC-V 64-bit cores at 1.85GHz. This is just a basic quad-core RISC-V entry level server plus the storage provided is just 128GB of eMMC storage along with 100 Mbit/s Ethernet. This is sufficient for "kicking the tires" of RISC-V in the cloud and doing any basic build testing or similar RISC-V CI/CD exposure but this isn't some high performance server. The four C920 RISC-V cores and 128GB of eMMC storage is paired with 16GB of system memory to provide for a healthy 4GB of RAM per core.
Scaleway Labs on the Elastic Metal RV1 page notes that the EM-RV1 servers are very power efficient at 0.96~1.9W per core at the 1.8GHz clock frequency. In addition to being very power efficient, they are very dense with Scaleway packing 672 servers into a single 52U rack.
