SiPearl

SiPearl is a French company founded in June 2019 by Philippe Notton to design high-performance, energy-efficient microprocessors for European exascale supercomputers. The company is developing the Rhea series of processors based on Arm's Neoverse architecture. SiPearl's first-generation chip, Rhea1, features 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores with dual 256-bit Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) units, four HBM2e memory stacks, and four DDR5 memory interfaces. The chip is designed to work with various accelerators, including GPUs, AI, and quantum processors. SiPearl has formal cooperation agreements with AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Graphcore for accelerator compatibility. The company aims to halve power consumption for equivalent computing power compared to existing solutions. Rhea1 is scheduled to sample in 2025 and will be manufactured by TSMC using its N6 (6nm-class) process. SiPearl is also developing a second-generation chip, Rhea2, which is expected to consist of two chiplets and offer increased performance.

Key customers and partnerships

SiPearl secured its first major customer in October 2023 with the JUPITER exascale supercomputer project in Germany. The EUR 273 million JUPITER system, to be operated by Forschungszentrum Jülich, will use SiPearl's Rhea1 processor alongside NVIDIA GPUs. The company has partnerships with Arm, Atos Group (through its Eviden business), and various European research institutions. In April 2023, SiPearl raised EUR 90 million in initial Series A funding, with investments from Arm, Atos Group, the European Innovation Council Fund, and the French government. The company is working closely with the European Processor Initiative (EPI) consortium, which includes 27 partners from the scientific community, supercomputing centers, and industry leaders.