the french company YesPearldedicated to the development of processors based on ARM chips for supercomputers, will collaborate with AMD in the development of exascale supercomputers. As stated in the terms of the agreement signed by both companies, SiPerl will contribute its Rhea processors to the development project, while amd will do the same with your Instinct GPUs.
This collaboration will also include the development of software compatible with Rhea processors, based on ARM. Also the evaluation of the interoperability of AMD’s ROCm open software with SiPearl’s Rhea CPU. ROCm is an open software platform for GPUs, and it seems that SiPearl wants to use it to program its CPU as well.
SiPearl’s Rhea SoC for high-performance computing applications incorporates 72 ARM Neoverse Zeus cores, interconnected via a mesh network. It also features a memory subsystem with four HBM2E memory stacks, and four or six channels of conventional DDR5 memory. With a memory subsystem like this, Rhea will be able to take advantage of the huge bandwidth enabled by HBM2E memory, as well as the high memory capacity enabled by DDR5.
While the Rhea CPU promises to deliver powerful performance, it doesn’t appear that it alone can power a supercomputer with performance exceeding an FP64 ExaFLOPS. At least not without consuming a large amount of energy. So it makes sense to couple the CPU to high-performance computing accelerators, or to GPUs like AMD’s Instinct MI250X or its successors. SiPearl also implies that AMD GPUs will not be the only choice for supercomputer operators adopting Rhea.
SiPearl’s Rhea processor is currently being implemented by Open-Silicon Research, a third-party chip developer in India. TSMC will take over manufacturing the CPU in 2023, using its 6-nanometer class N6 manufacturing process.
Philippe Notton, CEO and founder of SiPearlhas pointed out that «This new collaboration with a world leader will further enrich our joint high-performance computing microprocessor offering combined with partner acceleration solutions. This will give Europe’s supercomputer end-users more choice, and enable Europe to tackle the great challenges of our time, such as Artificial Intelligence, climate modeling and medical research.«.
in the meantime, Brad McCredie, Vice President of Data Centers and Accelerated Processing at AMDstresses that «high-performance computing is at the heart of AMD. Our AMD Instinct accelerators power the first supercomputer to break the exaflop barrier, and we continue to support numerous high-performance computing installations around the world with our products. As the world continues to need more computing performance to power the next discoveries that will change our society, AMD is delighted to take another step in the European ecosystem with SiPearl to together provide a clear path to meeting the demands of exascale supercomputing. in Europe«.
