SiFive's First Server Platform Is Boring, and That's a Good Thing
SiFive's new BigSky SF-2U870 server platform marks the company's first foray into the server market. With 32 P870-D cores, DDR5-5600, and PCIe 5.0, it's a capable development machine, but its real significance lies in RVA23 support, enabling out-of-the-box Ubuntu 26.04. Chips and Cheese compares it to x86 and Arm counterparts, noting it's not meant to beat them but to fill a gap in the RISC-V ecosystem: boring, reliable platforms for developers.
The BigSky is boring, and as I said up top, that is a good thing.
- ComputerGuru
Not to knock on RISC-V, which I’ve been following from the embedded side of things for many years now, but I feel I must question the value of a license-free ISA in this specific market segment at this time.
Surely between the squeeze on RAM and storage pricing and the exorbitant costs of training or mass-inference scale GPUs (if you’re going into AI), the nominal cost of the CPU licensing is really not going to make or brake anything or unlock some new business viability?
Even RISC-V aside, we are essentially in a position that would have been impossible to even dream of ten or twenty years ago when Intel was the only player in the game.
Wouldn’t buying off-lease hardware (not even in bulk) give you better performance per dollar, better compatibility, and more options?
Not to say any of this will always be the case; even if RAM pricing doesn’t come down, storage will, and RISC-V processors will (maybe) eventually actually be competitive when it comes to SOTA performance, but today in 2026?
- ozereray1
RISC V making its way into proper server platforms is a huge milestone. The open architecture could eventually disrupt the current vendor lock in we see in cloud data centers.
- yjftsjthsd-h
> Support for double-wide GPUs (Up to 450W)
I wonder how the driver situation is. From Jeff Geerling's work on running "big" GPUs on Raspberry Pis, my impression is that often less-common platforms should work but are littered with papercuts in practice.
- mrbluecoat
> SiFive isn’t trying to beat x86 or Arm with the BigSky platform and it doesn’t have to. This is a development system
A 2U dev unit? Seems a bit premature..
- br0ceph
what is the boot environment like for these type of platforms?
is it opensource or megs of blob?