The European Processor Initiative (EPI) will continue in the next few years with the aim of supplying European countries and companies with self-developed hardware. The debut Rhea-1 – an ARM processor with 72 CPU cores – is expected to be followed by the successor Rhea-2 this year.
Advertisement
The French company SiPearl remains in charge and wants to significantly shorten its development cycles. The experience the company has gained with Rhea-1 obviously helps here.
In recent months, several roadmaps have been featured on the EPI website that have previously flown under the radar. Everyone mentioned or is already mentioning Rhea-2 for the year 2024. Those responsible don't reveal many details, but it is clear that the logic is distributed across two chiplets. In addition, HBM storage sticks are likely to sit on the carrier – Rhea-1 already used HBM2e. SiPearl probably continues to use the ARM instruction set.
According to an interview between SiPearl boss Philippe Notton and HPC Wire, it is clear that Rhea-2 is switching from TSMC's N6 – an improved 7-nanometer process – to a newer manufacturing generation. A 5 nm process like N5 or N4 would be conceivable. As soon as Intel Foundry chips are produced in Germany, EPI could switch to the company.
RISC-V accelerator
At the same time, the development of accelerator cards is progressing. The previous European Processor Accelerator (EPAC). EPI as a demo project. A second version is scheduled to appear in 2025 as a PCI Express card under the code name Hurricane. Unlike the Rhea processors, RISC-V technology is used here. Accelerators are likely to become particularly important for AI algorithms in the future.
In the meantime, the EPI website promised exascale supercomputers with Rhea-2 CPUs from 2026. The roadmap now only lists “Rhea” and no longer “Rhea-2”. Since Jupiter is the first supercomputer with Rhea-1 CPUs to provide exaflops FP64 computing power this year, a Rhea-2 system in 2026 would be realistic.
(mma)