SiPearl The basis for new processors from European development

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European Processor Initiative Backed SiPearl Announces Licensing of Arm Zeus Neoverse CPU IP

Work on new processors from Europe is taking shape, based on the development of chips at a company based in Paris. Money comes, among other things, from the funding pots of the European Union.

The company called Sipearl was founded at the beginning of this year and it has now announced that licence agreements with ARM have been concluded. This is now the basis for developing their own processors, which should be based on the ARM-Neoverse architecture of Zeus. Zeus emerged from the Ares core, which was in large part a Cortex-A77, but without being oriented towards use in mobile platforms.

The political approach behind the project is the European Processor Initiative (EPI), which was launched some time ago by the EU Commission. This is to ensure that Europe has its own processor platform to be more independent of the large chip companies from the US and the emerging alternatives from China.

Sipearl: CPU Roadmap

Chips for supercomputers and more
The processors developed at Sipearl are to be used in high performance environments, that is, in supercomputers and similar systems. ARM chips have been under observation for some time now, as they offer good conditions between performance and energy demand. It is expected that the first chips will be available in the coming year - but this will probably be mainly a test sample, on the basis of which further parts of the associated platform can be developed.

From 2022 onwards, the second generation will also start working on the implementation of Exascale supercomputers. Furthermore, the processors could then also be offered for the automotive sector, where increasingly fast chips are also needed to operate assistance systems up to the complete autonomy of the vehicles. The production of the processors is expected to take place at TSMC, as there are still no plants in Europe to produce the desired 7 nanometer structures.