While investigating the RISC-V ecosystem, we noticed that there isn't an easy way for developers to build and test their software on native hardware without buying it.
So we integrated custom RISC-V servers in our bare metal servers infrastructure and made them available to the public to enable the building, porting and testing of more native RISC-V software.
A 4 Cores TH1520 with 16 GiB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC is 15,99€/month.
According to my tests, it's billed by the hour with no minimum commitment. It's attractive indeed for transient workloads. €15.99 for one month commitment sounds okay-ish when comparing with competitor's offering at this price (but you don't get RISC-V servers there (yet)).
This is an great deal for developers, if 0,042€/hour means per hour of compute. If you tests with cross compilation and qemu anyways and sometimes needs test/benchmark on the native hardware, then this means you can spend about 5€ and you are probably set for months if not a year.
Also, with the latest gcc you can finally target rvv 0.7.1, which is supported by these CPUs. You just write your standardized rvv 1.0 intrinsics and if you add `-march=64gcxtheadvector` gcc 14 will just generate the equivalent rvv 0.7.1: https://godbolt.org/z/va9sfEnMW
With GCC trunk now (and soon 14.1) supporting 0.7.1 and furthermore supporting compiling the exact same RVV C intrinsics source code to either 0.7.1 or 1.0, this is not the obstacle it once was.
So we integrated custom RISC-V servers in our bare metal servers infrastructure and made them available to the public to enable the building, porting and testing of more native RISC-V software.
A 4 Cores TH1520 with 16 GiB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC is 15,99€/month.