The RISC-V ecosystem welcomes SiFive's new Big Sky SF-2U870 server platform, designed as a standardized development system for high-performance application silicon. The 2U server features 32 P870-D cores running at 2.2 GHz, 128GB of DDR5-5600 memory, and 64 lanes of PCIe 5.0 alongside four lanes of PCIe Gen 3.0. A key highlight is support for the RVA23 standard, enabling it to run Ubuntu 26.04 straight out of the box.

Compared to SiFive's prior Hi Five Premier P550, the Big Sky offers significantly increased capability. In the market, it differentiates from Intel Xeon 6532P-B with more PCIe lanes and likely lower power, while comparing favorably to AMD EPYC 8325P. Notably, against the Ampere Altra Q32-17, the Big Sky offers higher clock speeds and PCIe Gen 5 support, though the Ampere Q80-33 surpasses it in raw core count.

SiFive positions this platform not to beat x86 or Arm, but to fill a critical gap in the RISC-V ecosystem: providing a 'boring' development system that just works. By supporting RVA23, SiFive addresses the ecosystem's historical lack of compatible silicon, allowing developers to focus on coding rather than firmware challenges. The platform is positioned as fit-for-purpose for software development and CI workloads.