French cloud Scaleway starts renting Alibaba's RISC-V SoC

French cloud provider Scaleway has fired up an instance type powered by a RISC-V system-on-chip (SoC), developed by Chinese tech giant Alibaba's T-Head offshoot. Scaleway announced the new instance type, the EM-RV1, late last week at the very keen price of €15.99 per month for servers equipped with 16GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB …

[Pascal Monett]

Wow, what a deal

"Les Services BETA peuvent être modifiés, suspendus ou définitivement interrompus par SCALEWAY sans préavis et sans que ceci ne donne le droit au Client à une quelconque indemnité."

Meaning the service can be suspended or cancelled without warning and without penality for Scaleway.

So you've got it only as long as Scaleway can be arsed to let you have it, and if it fails, it's your problem.

And to think that there are numpties who will really think they're getting a good deal for their production environment.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Wow, what a deal

Hint is in the name "Risk"

[trevorde]

Zero Percent Service Level Agreement (French style)

Shrug shoulders, pout, light a Gitane and go to lunch

[Bruce Hoult]

Other sources -- including photos -- make it clear they are using Sipeed's Lichee Cluster 4A, with each (rather small) box holding seven compute-module style boards. The same daughterboard used in the LicheePi 4A, Lichee Console etc.

The CPUs are slow by x86 standards, about the same as the Arm A72 used in the Raspberry Pi 4 -- or in the first AWS Graviton in late 2018.

Sipeed tweeted that they'll be supplying cloud-suitable boards using SiFive's P550 and P670 CPU cores this year. P670 is around 2x the performance at the same MHz, plus the SG2380 SoC is promised to be actually running at 2.4 GHz (let's see...), so that's another 1.3x.

These are physical, bare metal, servers obviously. You have your choice of three OSes and they are the real OS, no hypervisor.

[ldo]

Re: real OS, no hypervisor.

Is there a way to do some kind of remote console access if you manage to b0rk your box?

[druck]

Those are very slow for cloud systems. For two months rent you could buy your own Pi 4B.

[Paul Smith]

Using a chip from China

"Using a chip from China – a nation credibly suspected of using its presence in tech supply chains to enable economic espionage – is an interesting way to establish sovereignty and free users from geopolitical constraints."

Obviously safer than to using chips from the USA, a nation categorically proven to use its presence in tech supply chains to enable economic espionage.