SiFive has launched the BigSky SF-2U870, a rack-mount development server built around its own RISC-V processors, aimed at helping software developers and hyperscalers port workloads to the open-standard chip architecture. Unveiled at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, the system is designed to speed up datacentre software porting, workload optimisation and validation, and SiFive claims it already has hyperscale and software partners running workloads on deployed units, alongside major system-on-chip vendors. The move mirrors Arm's earlier strategy of seeding development hardware to drive adoption of an alternative architecture in the datacentre, though SiFive still needs a marquee hyperscaler customer to spur mass deployment, much as Amazon did for Arm.

The server packs 32 of SiFive's P870-D cores at 2GHz, 256GB of DDR5 memory, two 7.68TB NVMe SSDs and a 10/25Gbps OCP-compliant network adapter, and SiFive bills it as the world's first enterprise-grade 2U RISC-V rack server, though that claim is hard to verify given China's Sophgo also sells similar hardware. Confirmed backers include Linux vendors Canonical and Red Hat, which has RHEL 10 running on the platform, while SiFive is also working with Nvidia to port its CUDA stack and integrate NVLink Fusion, having already demonstrated CUDA running on BigSky, a first for RISC-V hardware. The BigSky SF-2U870 is available now, though only in limited quantities.