SiPearl’s recent announcement of the Rhea1 tape-out marks a significant milestone not only for European technological sovereignty but also for the EU-funded HIGHER project. As the designer of the most complex processor ever conceived in Europe, SiPearl continues to position itself as a cornerstone of the continent’s high-performance computing ambitions.
SiPearl plays a central role within the HIGHER project, which aims to develop and validate open-source designs for high-density rack-scale systems capable of supporting cloud and edge services at scale in standards-based data center environments. It leads work on architecture and verification, and heads key technical tasks including requirements capture, the Rhea2-based Host Processor Module (HPM), and the ARM secure boot and OS. It also contributes to the DC-SCM management module and firmware development, leveraging its deep processor design expertise.
While Rhea1—the 80-core Arm Neoverse V1 processor—will power Europe’s first exascale supercomputer JUPITER, the technology foundations it lays are directly relevant to Rhea2. The Rhea2 HPM and related security and control modules developed in HIGHER will be fully compatible with the Open Compute Project (OCP) ecosystem, allowing SiPearl to extend their reach via the OCP server marketplace, which is seeing growing global adoption.
By aligning its commercial roadmap with open standards and strategic EU initiatives like HIGHER, SiPearl ensures that Rhea processors will not only power elite supercomputers but also become widely deployable building blocks for secure, sovereign data centers and AI infrastructures across Europe and beyond.