SiPearl, a processor designer supported by the European Processor Initiative, is about to start shipments of its very first Rhea processor for high-performance computing workloads. But the company is already working on its successor currently known as Rhea-2, which is set to arrive sometimes 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 connected using a mesh network. The CPU has an hybrid memory subsystem that supports both HBM2E and DDR5 memory to get both high memory bandwidth and decent memory capacity as well as supports PCIe interconnects with the CXL protocol on top. The CPU was designed by a contract chip designer and is made by TSMC on its N6 (6 nm-class) process technology.
