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

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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.

www.theregister.com/, Mar. 04, 2024 – 

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 of eMMC storage.

The servers are said to consume between 0.96W and 1.9W per 1.8GHz core, and to be so small that a 52U rack holds up to 672 of the machines – although it is unclear if they're physical or virtual. Each server comes equipped with a 100Mbit/sec ethernet network card and the service includes public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Ubuntu, Debian, and Alpine Linux will run on the instances.

The machines use the T-Head C910 SoC with the following specs:

• RV64GCV 4 cores 1.85 GHz
• GPU (OpenCL 1.1/1.2/2.0, OpenGL ES 3.0/3.1/3.2, Vulkan 1.1/1.2, Android NN HAL)
• VPU (H.265/H.264/VP9 video encoding/decoding)
• NPU (4TOPS@INT8 1GHz, Tensorflow, ONNX, Caffe)

The Register has previously sighted the SoC on a development board that Alibaba claimed included parts it uses in its own ecosystem and CPU cores that can reach 2.5GHz. It is unclear whether Scaleway has throttled the SoC to keep things cooler, or is using a variant of the SoC.

Scaleway execs pitched the instance type as the first step towards Europe developing a truly sovereign cloud that features home-grown processing power.

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