Mastodawn

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

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lymenzies Mar 14

@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.

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Ludovic Henry Mar 16

@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.

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Ludovic Henry

@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