SiPearl has finalized its Rhea1 processor and transferred the design to TSMC for production. The chip is intended to power a European exascale computer in Germany.
The European Union doesn’t just want exascale computers, it wants exascale systems of European origin. Crucial to this is a chip developed in the EU. That chip, the Rhea1 processor built by SiPearl, is now ready for manufacturing.
Delay
SiPearl has completed the design and optimized it for TSMC’s production processes. This is a major hurdle, which is being overcome with considerable delay.
Originally, the plan was to finalize the design in 2022, with the first chips scheduled for 2023. Now that TSMC has received the design, production can effectively begin, but the first components won’t be ready until 2026.
read also
European Exascale Processor Ready for Production
At the start of the design process, Rhea1 was supposed to be a 6 nm chip. Given the delay, that process is no longer cutting-edge, but SiPearl hasn’t used the extra time to port the design to another node.
Neoverse
The processor uses Arm’s Neoverse V1 design and integrates 80 Neoverse cores on a single chip. SiPearl places 54 GB of HBME2 memory on top of that.
This should be sufficient to power the Jupiter supercomputer. Part of that German supercomputer is already active today, without SiPearl’s chips. Even at partial capacity, the 24,000 Nvidia GH200 chips in that system are enough for a place in the global top five.
Jupiter will be expanded in the future with a CPU cluster featuring 1,300 nodes, each containing two Rhea1 processors.
Independent?
The step toward production is important for the EU’s capacity to develop powerful chips independently, although there are some caveats to the project. The development is done by French company SiPearl, but the Neoverse designs are from British Arm and production is handled by TSMC in Taiwan. So Rhea1 isn’t truly independent, although the project certainly develops important expertise within the Union.