SiFive pushes development server to take RISC-V into the datacenter

Silicon Valley-based SiFive has unveiled its BigSky SF-2U870 development server, aimed at accelerating the transition of workloads to the RISC-V open compute architecture. The company showcased the system at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, California, where it will demonstrate various server workloads, workload optimization, and system validation.

RISC-V is an open instruction set, free for anyone to use, provided they can design and manufacture compliant processor chips. The BigSky SF-2U870 is a rack-mount 2U server, the world's first enterprise-grade RISC-V system, featuring 32 P870-D cores operating at 2 GHz, 256 GB DDR5 memory, and 7.68 TB NVMe SSDs. SiFive claims the system is currently running workloads for hyperscalers, software developers, and major SoC vendors, including China's Sophgo, a 2U rack-mount RISC-V server vendor.

The BigSky SF-2U870's availability marks an important step in SiFive's mission to enable customers to optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of custom SoC solutions using its IP, with over 10 billion cores shipped to date. While the company remains tight-lipped about its customers, it has partnered with Linux distributors Canonical and Red Hat to validate RISC-V's potential in the datacenter.

SiFive is also working with Nvidia to integrate the CUDA software stack into future RISC-V designs, enabling AI servers for large language model (LLM) workloads using Nvidia GPU clusters.