SiFive's First Server Platform
Ranked #8 on Hacker News with 36 points and 7 comments.
The RISC-V ecosystem is an ever-evolving one especially in the high-performance application class silicon space. We have seen a number of acquisitions and exits in the past year with Ventana being acquired by Qualcomm in December of last year and the wrapping up of operations of Condor Computing. We have also seen silicon being taped out with the most prolific chip being SpacemiT’s K3 SoC with Tenstorrent following suit with their Atlantis SoC along with Akeana taping out their test chip.
But today we are not talking about those companies nor those chips. Today we are talking about a company that has been in the RISC-V scene since the very beginning, SiFive and their new platform, the SiFive BigSky SF-2U870.
The BigSky SF-2U870 (BigSky) platform consists of:
64 Lanes of PCIe 5.0 plus 4 Lanes of PCIe Gen 3.0
Support for double-wide GPUs (Up to 450W)
To be frank, this platform is boring, and that is a good thing. Boring platforms are the ideal state for a platform because it means that you can just start developing for the platform instead of messing around trying to get the system up and running.