The European designer of processors for HPS and IA and data centers Spearl already has an approximate date for the launch of the first high -performance European processordesigned for both civil and military use: the Second half of 2027. It will be then when I see the light Athena1a chip that can have up to 80 nuclei.
The design base of the Spearl Athena1 processor part of the RHEA chip design, but will also have high level encryption and additional security capabilities at the time it is available for purchase. As for RHEA, it will have sample units in early 2026, which marks another delay in its departure, of approximately half a year.
The RHEA1 processors, of 80 Neaven V1 nuclei will be integrated into Jupiter, the first Suaescala Supercomputer in Europe, owned by Eurohpc Ju. Incubated within the European Processor Initiative (EPI) consortium and initially financed by the European Union, Sipearl currently employs 200 people in France, Spain and Italy. In a first round of financing as Serial A, the company raised 130 million euros, and is about to launch another round, for series B.Principaleprincipal
Although it is a derivative of RHEA, Athena1 will be improved with data integrity and security functions demanded by government, aerospace and defense sectors, so that they can use it in specific applications of their areas of activity.
Specifically, this chip will be able to activate encrypted communications work loads, intelligence analysis, cryptographic operations and, after its installation in vehicles, in situ process in defense and aerospace environments.
When derived from RHEA, the company’s first processor for high -performance computing, Sipearl is based on the NEO taverse V1 architecture, and will be available with five configurations, depending on its number of New V1: 16, 32, 48, 64 or 80. even servers, through military vehicles.
Siperl Athena1 also incorporates 256 -bit scalable vector extension units, and consists of 61,000 million transistors, manufactured in its entirety by TSMC. Sipearl, in fact, has hired the services of the Taiwanese company to produce and package the two CPUS, both Rhea and Athena.
Its manufacture, however, will suffer variations over time. Thus, although the first chip batch that Sipearl has commissioned will be manufactured entirely in Taiwan, the company has plans to change its manufacture to Europe gradually, with the aim of reducing its dependence on external manufacturing ecosystems.
Although its date of departure to the market is already known, there are still enough questions to answer about Athena1. The first one is whether CPUS based on Neaven V1, which was launched in 2020, and manufactured with TSMC N6 process technology, which belongs to the generation of TSMC 7 nanometers that began to be used in 2019, will be able to offer competitive performance, and a sufficient level of efficiency, in 2027.
This doubt arises, above all, because by then there will be CPUS with V3 Cores and even V4 of Neaven in the market. Spearl wanted to clear this doubt ensuring that the main advantage of its processor is its sovereign nature. Of course, we will have to wait if with this argument you can convince different companies that it is better to use this chip than others than. They can incorporate more modern architectures.
According to Philippe Notton, CEO and founder of Sipearl«In an era of geopolitical uncertainty, with the increase in cybersecurity problems and armed conflicts, the technological sovereignty of Europe is increasingly inseparable from sovereign hardware, either for civil applications or, what is more important, for defense. Therefore, it was natural that Siperl took advantage of the experience developed by its R&D teams in HPC to develop a new version of our first processor that perfectly meets the double -use needs. As part of the roadmap that Europe has entrusted to promote the return of high -performance processors technologies to the continent, Athena1 is Rhea1’s perfect complement to help affirm the strategic independence of Europe«.
