SiFive has introduced the BigSky SF-2U870, a 2U, rackable RISC-V datacenter development server aimed at hands-on software porting, workload tuning, and validation testing. The company says it built the platform in collaboration with hyperscaler customers and ecosystem partners, with “lead customers” already running workloads on deployed systems.
BigSky SF-2U870 is based on SiFive’s P870-D CPU technology and is designed as a development platform for bringing enterprise software environments and datacenter workloads onto RISC-V. For operators and platform teams evaluating RISC-V beyond embedded and edge use cases, a rack-form-factor, server-oriented box is the practical starting point: it’s what you need to shake out boot flows, drivers, kernel support, and application behavior under real rack and NIC topologies.
SiFive lists these hardware specifications for the BigSky SF-2U870: 32 P870-D cores at 2.0 GHz, 256 GB of DDR5-5600 memory, four PCIe Gen5 x16 slots (64 lanes total) plus PCIe Gen3 x4, support for an x16 double-wide GPU, a 3.84 TB U.2 NVMe data SSD, and a 10/25Gb OCP 3.0 NIC.
The platform is described as fully compliant with the RVA23 standard, which SiFive says reduces the need for complex custom porting and enables out-of-the-box deployment of enterprise software environments. SiFive also calls out out-of-the-box support for Canonical Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Red Hat RHEL 10.
On the accelerated computing side, SiFive says it is working with NVIDIA to port CUDA to SiFive-based RISC-V hardware and to integrate NVLink Fusion into future SiFive platforms. SiFive also says CUDA is now running on the P870-D-powered BigSky development platform, and it describes the system as able to act as the head node for modern LLM workloads on NVIDIA GPUs.
“With BigSky, we have delivered a powerful turnkey server platform designed to accelerate development of customer datacenter workloads and software on the RISC-V open standard,” said Patrick Little, chairman and CEO of SiFive.
SiFive says the platforms are available today and are currently being produced in limited quantities.
Source: SiFive
