We are still looking for some nice ARM servers (VPS) / devices / computers and were wondering if anybody here has, perhaps, a good recommendation (aside from the Raspberry Pi, perhaps)?

netcup do offer ARM servers, but they are currently all sold out. Hetzner also offers them, but we would very much prefer to not use Hetzner if possible  

In addition to ARM, another thing which we have been wanting to try out is RISC-V – does anyone know of any boards / computers that we could get for that?

#linux #sysadmin #arm #riscv

RISC-V is sloooow – Marcin Juszkiewicz

143 vs 36 minutes is far too big difference

@anubis I read some devs board are sold or began to sold soon, but the platform itself is under heayy development, than being something usable for heavy tasks, except for those not very intensive.
Anyway I read about a couple of them.

StarFive VisionFive 2 (but I don't find working links)
Milk-V: https://milkv.io/
Banana Pi BPI-F3: https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/BananaPi_BPI-F3
BeagleV: https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-ahead
CD-Roma: https://deepcomputing.io/product/dc-roma-risc-v-laptop-ii/

Milk-V

Milk-V is committed to providing high quality RISC-V products to developers, enterprises and consumers, and to promoting the development of the RISC-V hardware and software ecosystem. Milk-V will firmly support open source, and hopes that through its own efforts and those of the community, future RISC-V products will be as numerous and bright as the stars in the Milky Way.

@anubis As far I read around, the computing power is still inferior than Arm, but the development is leaping forward really quick in few years. For now the boards are mostly for development for software and hardware. Some linux and BSD (I think) supports it.
It could not take (relatively) long to catch up the gap with Arm.
@anubis Scaleway sells ARM VPSes. I haven't tried the ARM servers specifically, but I run some services on AMD64 with them and have no complaints about Scaleway in general.

@anubis

Echoing other comments here, it is slow. I have a smattering of RiscV boards, the fastest being the VisionFive 2. Performance is somewhere in the Raspberry Pi 4 territory while having better file system performance due to the nvme slot. There's quite a bit of software ported already, but I couldn't imagine trying to use it for anything serious.

All the other RiscV computers I have are glacially slow. Single-core. Most are slower than the original Raspberry Pi zero.

@lymenzies @anubis @lymenzies @anubis this used to be true, up to early last year. With the availability of the HiFive P550, Spacemit K3 based boards and other options, it’s starting to get usable for more than just a toy project. Case in point, we are building Adoptium (OpenJDK), Go, PyTorch, Llama.cpp, Python, and many other projects on RISC-V and it’s not that far off.
@lymenzies @anubis and to answer the original question, Scaleway has both ARM and RISC-V machines, the ARM are bigger (up to 32 cores VM IIRC), and the RISC-V are still fairly small (4 cores, 16GB of RAM) but more options should come very soon