Europe Challenges Intel and AMD: Rhea1, the 'Sovereign' Processor for AI is Activated

SiPearl has announced that it has reached a strategic milestone for the European technological sovereignty project: the first operational startup of the Rhea1 processor, a CPU designed for HPC applications, artificial intelligence, and datacenters. The event marks the completion of the chip's "power-on" phase, which took place on May 13, and represents the first concrete step towards the validation of the processor that will be integrated into the European exascale supercomputer JUPITER.

According to the French company, the initial results obtained have been positive and indicate that the processor performs in line with the design specifications. In the next three months, the functional validation phase will continue, during which all hardware and software functionalities, including interfaces, stability, and performance characteristics, will be progressively tested.

Rhea1 is described by SiPearl as the most complex server processor ever designed in Europe. The chip integrates over 61 billion transistors, equivalent to about 7.8 billion logic gates, and adopts an architecture based on 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores. Each core has two 256-bit SVE vector units designed to accelerate scientific workloads and AI while maintaining high energy efficiency.

Among the distinctive features of the platform is the integration of High Bandwidth Memory directly into the processor package. Rhea1 uses four HBM stacks to increase the available bandwidth, a particularly relevant feature for scientific simulations, big data analysis, and AI inference scenarios where the bottleneck is often represented by memory access.

The hardware configuration also includes four DDR5 interfaces with support for two DIMMs per channel and 104 PCI Express Gen5 lines, which can be organized into up to six x16 and two x4 connections. The stated goal is to provide a complete platform for European HPC systems, reducing dependence on non-European technologies.

Rhea1 will be used in the CPU module of EuroHPC JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer, hosted at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. An exascale system is capable of exceeding one quintillion operations per second, a threshold considered crucial for advanced simulations, scientific research, and large-scale AI development.

According to CEO and founder Philippe Notton, the project represents the return of high-performance processor design expertise to Europe, a sector that the continent had progressively abandoned since the 1980s. The company also emphasizes aspects related to security and digital sovereignty, indicating Rhea1 as a solution free of "backdoors" and "kill switches" controlled by external entities.

Founded in 2020, SiPearl employs about 200 people distributed among France, Spain, and Italy, and is financially supported by the European Union and the French government. After a Series A round of 130 million euros, the company has initiated a Series B fundraising to support the next development phases.

The general availability of Rhea1 is expected by the end of 2026. In addition to JUPITER, the company's roadmap already includes a second generation of processors, named Rhea2, intended for the European supercomputer Alice Recoque in France.