SiPearl, the company building European processors for supercomputing and AI, said it has “completed the conception” of the Rhea1 processor, which the company said has 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores and composed of more than 61 billion transistors. SiPearl said the chip was taped-out several weeks ago and handed off to TSMC for manufacturing. Samples are scheduled for early next year.
Supported by a range of compilers, libraries and tools, from traditional programming languages such as C/C++, GO and RUST to modern AI frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, Rhea1 is built for traditional HPC workloads and AI inference.
Rhea1 will equip the CPU cluster of JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer, owned by EuroHPC JU and operated by Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. It will also be a component of such European collaborative projects as Aero, OpenCUBE, HIGHER and Riser to promote the emergence of a sovereign European cloud, and Excellerat, MAX, ODISSEE, and Plasma-PEPSC to run simulation applications. SiPearl “will help ensure the future of Europe’s technological sovereignty, independence, and competitiveness,” the company said.
Other chip details:
- High Bandwidth Memory, with 4 stacks of HBM;
- 4 DDR5 interfaces supporting 2 DIMMs per channel (2DPC);
- 104 lanes of PCIe Gen5 interface: up to 6 x16 lanes + 2 x4 lanes;
- Arm Neoverse CMN-700 Coherent Mesh Network on Chip (NoC) to interconnect compute and I/O elements;
“Thanks to both the generous memory capacity and high bandwidth in-package memory (HBM), it will deliver extraordinary performance and energy-efficiency with an unrivalled byte-per-flop ratio,” SiPearl said in its announcement.
SiPeal also announced the closing of its €130m Series A financing round with a third and last tranche of €32m.
Seed funded by the European Union, SiPearl was launched in January 2020 under the auspices of the European Processor Initiative (EPI) consortium, which aims to foster the return of high-performance energy-efficient processor technologies in Europe. The company said it has built a team of 200 employees in France, Spain, and Italy, and it has set up its own sovereign infrastructure with data centers in northern France equipped with servers and emulators dedicated to semiconductor design.
Philippe Notton, CEO and Founder of SiPearl
SiPearl’s said it investment round is the largest Series A in the European fabless semiconductor industry. Its third tranche of funding is backed by two existing investors, the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, from the European Commission, the French State, via French Tech Souveraineté, which is part of France 2030 led by the General Secretariat for Investment (attached to the Prime-Minister’s Office), and a new investor, the Taiwanese Cathay Venture, its first investment in France. Cathay Venture is a subsidiary of Cathay Financial Holdings Co., Ltd., one of the largest financial holdings in Taiwan, with total assets exceeding US$400 billion.
The Series A funding will be used to support the industrialization phase of Rhea1 and accelerate R&D for the next-generation processors” that will meet the needs of supercomputing and new market segments, such as data centers, AI and enterprises, ahead of the launch of Series B funding round in a few weeks,” SiPeal said.
In addition to its CEO-founder and main shareholder, SiPearl counts now among its investors Arm, Atos Group, through its Eviden business, Cathay Venture, European Investment Bank (EIB), EIC Fund, French Tech Souveraineté and a banking pool led by Caisse d’Epargne RhôneAlpes.
“Today’s geopolitical and economic context confirms the vision that led to SiPearl’s inception,” said Philippe Notton, CEO and founder of SiPearl. “Sovereign hardware is mandatory to ensure Europe’s independence and sovereignty in AI and strategic fields such as security and defense. With the tape-out of the most complex processor ever designed in Europe, we are showing that Europe now has a competitor capable of challenging non-European leaders. Because Europe needs strong and independent partners in the global semiconductor ecosystem, we have chosen to forge closer ties with Taiwan, a country at the forefront of this industry worldwide.”
