Benchmarking The First RISC-V Cloud Server: Scaleway EM-RV1 Performance

The Elastic Metal RV1 is interesting for being the world's first RISC-V server in the cloud and having great energy efficiency at reportedly around 1 Watt per core (unfortunately no power monitoring data was accessible with this cloud instance) as well as being very cheap to operate at around $0.045 USD for the hourly rate with Scaleway. It's also dense very dense thanks to its low power/thermal needs with Scaleway managing 672 servers into a single 52U rack. Due to the very low cost and cloud-based, it's a very affordable way to tinker with RISC-V and/or leveraging RISC-V exposure for any CI/CD type testing and similar. But with just four cores at 1.85GHz and eMMC storage, it's not an instance type for delivering leading-edge performance.

Across 71 benchmarks ran across all three Scaleway Elastic Metal instance types, the EM-RV1 was much slower than even the aging Intel and AMD x86_64 instances. The EM-A315X that is using a 10 year old Ivy Bridge Xeon with 4 cores was around 7.4x the performance of this RISC-V cloud server. Or the half-decade old Ryzen 5 PRO 3600 within the EM-A210R instance was 18.3x the performance of the EM-RV1. Comparing to the very latest Intel and AMD CPUs would be even more mind-boggling advantages for latest x86_64 performance over RISC-V. See all the benchmarks in full here.

The Scaleway Labs EM-RV1 is interesting for a number of reasons as noted and a great way to dabble with RISC-V cheaply in the cloud, but do so with realistic performance expectations. Those wanting to learn more about the EM-RV1 RISC-V servers in the cloud can do so via Scaleway Labs; thanks to Scaleway for providing the gratis access to the EM-RV1 instance type for carrying out these cloud performance benchmarks.