SiFive's BigSky SF-2U870 gives RISC-V developers a standard 2U server with RVA23

SiFive's first server platform

SiFive, a company that has been part of the RISC-V landscape since its earliest days, has introduced its first server platform: the BigSky SF-2U870. According to Chips and Cheese, the launch lands in a high-performance RISC-V market that spent the past year consolidating — Ventana was acquired by Qualcomm in December 2025 and Condor Computing has wound down operations — even as several players taped out new silicon, including SpacemiT's K3 SoC, Tenstorrent's Atlantis and Akeana's test chip.

The BigSky SF-2U870 is a standard 19-inch 2U server built around 32 P870-D cores running at 2.2 GHz. Chips and Cheese lists the rest of the configuration as:

• 256 GB of DDR5-5600 memory
• 64 lanes of PCIe 5.0 plus 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0
• Support for double-wide GPUs of up to 450 W
• A 10/25 GbE OCP 3.0 NIC
• A 960 GB SATA SSD for the operating system and a 3.84 TB U.2 NVMe SSD for data

Boring on purpose

Chips and Cheese describes the platform as boring, and means it as praise. The argument is that an unremarkable system is exactly what developers want: hardware they can install, boot and start building on, rather than spending weeks chasing firmware that lags behind the silicon.

Measured against SiFive's previous development board, the HiFive Premier P550, the new machine is a substantial upgrade. Per Chips and Cheese, the headline figures are less important than they look: core count, memory bandwidth and PCIe bandwidth all improved — the site puts the PCIe increase at more than 64 times — but the most consequential change sits elsewhere.

RVA23 is the real story

The feature that matters, according to the article, is support for the RVA23 profile. RVA23 brings the RISC-V vector extension (RVV) into the baseline, and it is required by Ubuntu 26.04, which means BigSky can run that distribution straight out of the box. For a software ecosystem that has struggled with fragmented feature sets across RISC-V chips, a server that boots a mainstream Linux release without qualification is significant in itself.

How the silicon compares

Chips and Cheese lines the spec sheet up against three comparable parts.

The closest match on paper is Intel's Xeon 6532P-B, which shares the same core count, base clock and memory subsystem. BigSky is credited with more PCIe lanes and likely lower power, while the Xeon counters with SMT2, a 3.9 GHz boost clock and a wider core.

Against AMD's EPYC 8325P, the site sees few if any specification advantages for the RISC-V machine beyond possibly lower power draw.

The most instructive comparison is with Ampere's Altra Q32-17, since the Altra platform played the same developer-system role that BigSky is targeting. BigSky offers higher clock speeds, a wider core and PCIe Gen 5; the Altra answers with more lanes, more memory bandwidth and a lower TDP. Chips and Cheese also cautions that the Q32-17 is the bottom SKU of the Altra family — the Q80-33, with 80 cores at 3.3 GHz and a 250 W TDP, would clearly outperform BigSky in a like-for-like comparison.

Why it matters

SiFive is not trying to out-engineer x86 or Arm with this machine, and by Chips and Cheese's assessment it does not need to. BigSky is a development system, and its value comes from RVA23 compliance rather than from topping spec tables. The long-standing weakness of the RISC-V ecosystem has been the absence of RVA23-class silicon paired with unexciting, reliable boxes that can simply run continuous integration workloads with no fuss. That is the gap SiFive is aiming to close. Availability is not yet pinned down, but the site expects developers to get their hands on the platform soon.