However, does anyone have experience with obtaining RISC-V server hardware on a commercially useful scale, i.e. more than 1pcs? Back when ARM servers where all the rage, there were lots of announcements, but almost never products one could order. Is RISC-V any better in that regard?
From what I got, the future should look like :
-You choose the RISC-V design first.
-From that design, you choose the fab that will produce the design. Each fab has its own price and trustfulness.
Maybe, but that would mean building our own hardware. I don't think anyone here would be comfortable with that, we are not big enough for such an endavour to make any sense at all. We'd rather buy off-the-shelf hardware, preferably from a selection of vendors...
I do not think there is anything to obtain yet. The only two designs that I am aware of and that are out-of-order are Berkley's BOOM and Alibaba's Xuantie 910. And then you also need a complete and standardized platform, i.e. chipsets, firmware interfaces, etc. There are also a few standard extensions, including "Packed-SIMD", "Vector" and "Transactional Memory" that are still in a draft state.
Yes. I just meant that when we tried to obtain a few ARM servers, the only quantity we ever got was "1 sample machine". Thus we couldn't even really try it out ourselves, let alone have customers do meaningful tests on a handful of machines.
Of course in "a few datacenters full of"-like quantities there was just no chance of getting anything. And of course, for making our own hardware (you can get ARM chips, just not full systems) we don't have the expertise, size and will.
Sure, but you need a handful of units to evaluate them properly. Availability of units is a huge concern and (imo) the largest barrier to boader adoption of non-x86 servers; ie, no sane person would hedge their operations on a single server vendor that can't reliably supply compatible units when needed. At least, not willingly.
However, does anyone have experience with obtaining RISC-V server hardware on a commercially useful scale, i.e. more than 1pcs? Back when ARM servers where all the rage, there were lots of announcements, but almost never products one could order. Is RISC-V any better in that regard?