Europe's first HPC ARM processor lands at TSMC

It's been a long time coming, but now SiPearl's first processor, Rhea1, seems to be making great strides forward: The company reports that it sent its CPU design to chip contract manufacturer TSMC in Taiwan weeks ago – the so-called tape-out process. TSMC is now creating exposure masks and then producing the first processors for testing. SiPearl is the most important company in the European Processor Initiative (EPI) for the development of CPUs for European companies and research institutions.

SiPearl plans to send samples to partners in early 2026. The largest customer is the German Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC), which plans to install more than 2,600 Rhea1 processors in over 1,300 server nodes. They will be installed in an additional CPU module of the Jupiter supercomputer. The complete finished system is capable of more than one trillion FP64 computing operations per second (one exaflops), but the Rhea1 CPUs only account for a tiny proportion of this: the JSC calculates with a good 5 petaflops, i.e., five trillion computing operations per second, or 0.005 exaflops.

Years behind schedule

SiPearl's sampling in early 2026 is rather late: Rhea1 was originally supposed to be available in 2021 and reduce Europe's dependence on US hardware. Meanwhile, there have apparently been several adjustments to the design with trade-offs between 64 and 80 CPU cores.

The final figure is now 80 ARM standard cores of the Neoverse V1 type, paired with 64 GByte HBM2e stack memory plus up to 512 GByte DDR5 RAM per processor. SiPearl is to use the N6 manufacturing process from TSMC's 7-nanometer class – a slightly improved 7 nm version.

This means that Rhea1 is already considered obsolete at launch, which is why interest is currently low. Both the production technology and the Neoverse V1 date back to 2020. AMD and Intel are already selling processors with more CPU cores, each of which is faster. SiPearl's focus is likely to be on Rhea-2 with a chiplet structure.

130 million euros in new capital, also from Taiwan

The company recently completed its so-called Series A financing for further development. SiPearl has received a total of 130 million euros from investors. These include ARM, Atos, Cathay Venture, the European Investment Bank, the European Innovation Council, the French state (French Tech Souveraineté), and a banking consortium led by Caisse d'Epargne Rhône-Alpes.

Cathay Venture is based in Taiwan and is SiPearl's first non-European investor. SiPearl says it wants to improve relations with Taiwan to drive processor development forward.

SiPearl currently employs 200 people in France, Spain, and Italy.

(mma)