Benchmarking The First RISC-V Cloud Server: Scaleway EM-RV1 Performance
Right from the start there was a substantial performance difference comparing the EM-RV1 quad-core RISC-V instance to these other Scaleway Elastic Metal x86_64 instances... Even with AMD Zen 2 and Intel Ivy Bridge being the other available Elastic Metal instances in the Scaleway cloud, they were many times faster than EM-RV1.
The EM-RV1 does at least only cost a mere $0.045 USD per hour... But on a performance-per-dollar basis these older x86_64 EM instances are still better value.
The EM-RV1 quad-core configuration taps out at 1.85GHz while the Intel Xeon E5 1410 v2 Ivy Bridge processor is 4 cores plus Hyper Threading (8 threads) and has a 3.2GHz turbo frequency with 2.8GHz base frequency. The Ivy Bridge CPU consumes 80 Watts while the RISC-V SoC is around 5 Watts... On a performance-per-Watt basis may be interesting but there wasn't any exposed power monitoring capabilities for this cloud testing.