French company SiPearl, which designs Arm-based processors for supercomputers, said on Monday alliance Together with AMD, we offer joint products for exascale supercomputers. Under the terms of the agreement, SiPearl will provide Rhea processors and AMD will provide Instinct computing GPUs.
The collaboration between the two companies includes building and “evaluating” software compatible with Arm-based Rhea processors.[ing] Interoperability of AMD’s ROCm open software with SiPearl Rhea CPUs”. AMD’s ROCm is an open platform software stack near metal for GPUs. Apparently SiPearl wants to use it to program the CPU. Note that his HPC software for Arm is still in its early stages. Perhaps making AMD’s ROCm and the programs that use it compatible with Rhea makes sense from a time-to-market perspective.
SiPearl’s Rhea system-on-chip (SoC) for high-performance computing (HPC) applications features 72 Arm Neoverse Zeus cores interconnected using a mesh network. It also has its own memory subsystem consisting of 4 HBM2E memory stacks and 4 or 6 regular DDR5 memory channels. Using such a memory subsystem allows Rhea to benefit from the extreme bandwidth provided by his HBM2E memory and the high memory capacity provided by DDR5.
Rhea’s CPU promises to deliver very good performance, but it doesn’t look like it alone can power a supercomputer with more than 1 FP64 ExaFLOPS of performance. At least not with reasonable power consumption. So it makes sense to pair the CPU with his HPC accelerator or compute GPU like AMD’s Instinct MI250X and its successors. SiPearl also hints that AMD’s computing GPUs aren’t the only option for supercomputer operators adopting Rhea.
SiPearl CEO and Founder Philippe Notton said: “This new collaboration with a global leader further enhances our joint offering of HPC microprocessors combined with partner acceleration solutions. We can tackle the big challenges of our time, such as intelligence: intelligence, climate modeling, and medical research.”
SiPearl’s Rhea processor is currently being implemented by Open-Silicon Research, the chip’s contract developer in India. The CPU is expected to be manufactured by TSMC in 2023 on the N6 (6nm class) manufacturing process.
“High Performance Computing is at the heart of AMD. Our AMD Instinct accelerator powers the first supercomputer to break through the exaflop barrier, and our products continue to support thousands of HPC installations worldwide. Fast processing on AMD. “As the world continues to need more computing power to drive the next discoveries that will change our society, AMD has made a clear commitment to meet Europe’s exascale supercomputing demands. We are pleased to take a step forward into the European ecosystem together with SiPearl to jointly provide a path forward.”
