French chip designer SiPearl has updated its Rhea-1 processor, an Arm-based CPU born out of the EU-funded European Processor Initiative (EPI), to support the development of homegrown hardware to power supercomputers.

However, while the company has confirmed the CPU will be more powerful than originally planned, the timeline for the availability of the processor has also been pushed back from 2023 to 2025.

Rhea-1, which is made using TSMC’s six nanometer N6 process, will feature 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, an increase from the 72 Neoverse cores the CPU was previously slated to have. Each core includes two 256-bit Scalable Vector Extensions, which the company says will optimize area and energy use.

The processor will also include four stacks of HBM2E (High Bandwidth Memory) to support high-performance computing, big data, and AI inferencing applications; and four DDR5 interfaces, supporting 2 DIMMs (Dual In-Line Memory Modules) per channel.

In addition to unveiling the specifications of Rhea-1, SiPearl announced it is partnering with Samsung Electronics to equip all its Rhea processors with HBM going forward.

“At SiPearl, we are thrilled to be a European pioneer in the use of HBM technology in conjunction with Samsung Electronics. Combining our high-performance, low-power microprocessor technologies with built-in HBM is key to meet all the requirements of supercomputing and AI inference workloads,” said Philippe Notton, CEO and founder of SiPearl. “On the fast-growing AI inference market, we think that our product will be a market-leading solution for inference Large Language Model (LLM) tasks providing among other things high flexibility to model changes relative to solutions currently in use.”

The Rhea-1 currently powers the EU’s first Exascale supercomputer, Jupiter, which is housed in a purpose-built building on the campus of the German research institution Forschungszentrum Jülich and operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC).

Jupiter stands for ‘Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research.’

JEDI (Jupiter's Exascale Development Instrument), the first module of Jupiter, launched in April 2024 and was ranked first on the most recent edition of the Green500 list.

In March 2024, SiPearl’s confirmed that its Rhea-2 processor, which the company says will be made using a more advanced process than its predecessor, will begin shipping in 2025. It remains unclear if, given the delays with Rhea-1, this timeline still stands.