SiPearl, a processor designer supported by the European Processor Initiative, is about to start out shipments of its very first Rhea processor for high-performance computing workloads. However the firm is already engaged on its successor at present generally known as Rhea-2, which is about to reach generally in 2026 in Exascale supercomputers.
SiPearl’s Rhea-1 datacenter-grade system-on-chip packs 72 off-the-shelf Arm Neoverse V1 cores designed for HPC and linked utilizing a mesh community. The CPU has an hybrid reminiscence subsystem that helps each HBM2E and DDR5 reminiscence to get each excessive reminiscence bandwidth and first rate reminiscence capability in addition to helps PCIe interconnects with the CXL protocol on high. The CPU was designed by a contract chip designer and is made by TSMC on its N6 (6 nm-class) course of know-how.
The unique Rhea is to a big diploma a product aimed to show that SiPearl, a European firm, can ship a datacenter-grade processor. This CPU now powers Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale sysatem that makes use of nodes powered by 4 Rhea CPUs and NVIDIA’s H200 AI and HPC GPUs. Provided that Rhea is SiPearl’s first processor, the undertaking could be thought-about as fruitful.
With its 2nd technology Rhea processors, SiPearl should develop one thing that’s significantly extra aggressive. That is maybe why Rhea-2 will use a dual-chiplet implementation. Such a design will allow SiPearl to pack extra processing cores and due to this fact supply increased efficiency. In fact, it stays to be seen what number of cores SiPearl plans to combine into Rhea 2, however not less than the CPU firm is about to undertake the identical design methodologies as AMD and Intel.
Given the timing for SiPearl’s Rhea 2 and the corporate’s pure with to protect software program compatibility with Rhea 1, it’s cheap to count on the processor to undertake Arm’s Neoverse V3 cores for its second processor. Arm’s Neoverse V3 supply fairly a major uplift in comparison with Neoverse V2 (and V1) and might scale to as much as 128 cores per socket, which ought to be fairly first rate for HPC purposes in 2025 – 2026.
Whereas SiPearl will proceed creating CPUs, it stays to be seen whether or not EPI will handle to ship AI and HPC accelerators which can be aggressive in opposition to these from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.
