French company to make Arm processor for supercomputers with European support

SiPearl, a French company working on a CPU for a European exascale computer, has signed a license agreement with Arm. SiPearl will design a processor based on Arm’s Zeus cores. That’s the codename of the successor to Arm’s Neoverse N1 cores.

SiPearl reports in a press release that it has entered into a major licensing deal with Arm. Under that agreement, SiPearl is allowed to use the design of Arm’s new Zeus core for its processor. Zeus is the successor of Ares, which in turn is the code name of the Arm Neoverse N1 cores, which are currently used by Amazon, among others, in the Graviton2 processor.

According to AnandTech, the Zeus core is the ‘little brother’ of the Cortex-A77 core, which Arm announced last year. Qualcomm uses the design of the A77 cores in its Snapdragon 865 soc for mobile devices.

SiPearl expects to introduce its first supercomputer processor in 2022. The French company is doing this in collaboration with and with financial support from the European Processor Initiative. This European initiative for designing proprietary processors for exascale supercomputers consists of 27 partners from 10 European countries.

A roadmap from the consortium states that the plan is to set up an experimental platform in 2021, which should then result in an exascale supercomputer from 2022. The roadmap shows the designation N6 at the Zeus core, according to AnandTech this indicates that the cpu is made on TSMC’s 6nm process. SiPearl stands for Silicon Pearl and was founded in 2019.