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. Since then, the company has fulfilled its mission by building a world-class processor team of 200 employees in France, Spain, and Italy, set up its own sovereign infrastructure with data centres in northern France equipped with servers and emulators dedicated to semiconductor design. SiPearl has completed the conception of the most complex processor ever designed in Europe, Rhea1. With 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, Rhea1 is composed of more than 61 billion transistors. Several weeks ago, it taped-out and was handed off to the world’s leading independent foundry, TSMC in Taïwan, for start of manufacturing.

Rhea1 will be available for sampling in early 2026. It is supported by a wide 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 perfectly suited to traditional HPC workloads - its initial target market - and AI inference workloads. 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.

Rhea1 will equip the CPU cluster of JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer which is owned by EuroHPC JU and operated by Jülich Supercomputing Centre (Germany). It will also be a key component of iconic European collaborative projects such 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 in strategic fields such as engineering, materials, dark matter, plasma.

Thus, SiPearl first family of products will help ensure the future of Europe’s technological sovereignty, independence, and competitiveness.