On one hand, it's nice to see funding to european companies to develop european technolgy, aiming at a technological sovereignty.
On the other hand, SiPearl looks like it was virtually unknown up to this point, and I can't seem to find anything looking like a cpu review (their website claims they have already released at least one generation of Rhea cpus). So this amount of money might not be wasted but still not optimally spent. Which isn't 100% bad, but at least bittersweet.
If anything, without reviews and performance benchmarks, we might just get ExaFLOPS on paper.
Like how does one of these Rhea CPUs compare to, say, a Graviton 2/3 or to an Ampere Altra cpu?
There's only one way to promote domestic industries in this space when they are behind/nonexistent: tons of subsidies, even if the domestic alternatives are worse. That's how China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan did it.
I know it gets a bad rap in China, and you have to get through the crys of socialism ... but I would like to see the state take partial ownership when it throws tons of subsidies at a domestic company like this.
(Neoverse V1 and HBM2e woild make this chip kinda old when its finally operational).
CPU design takes many years, and this was a HPC only chip, so it doesn't necessarily need to be marketed and paraded around, and the workloads will be totally different than what Graviton processors run.
They are using the ARM Neoverse V1 platform, so they aren't really greenfielding this. Comparatively the Altra uses the Neoverse N1 platform, which is an older HPC design. The supercomputer is planned to be very GPU heavy, so while the CPUs offer SVE they really are primarily orchestrators to the GPU and wouldn't be a major factor regardless. They're the duct tape.
Like many vendors in the ARM space, most of the real innovation and design comes from ARM.
On one hand, it's nice to see funding to european companies to develop european technolgy, aiming at a technological sovereignty.
On the other hand, SiPearl looks like it was virtually unknown up to this point, and I can't seem to find anything looking like a cpu review (their website claims they have already released at least one generation of Rhea cpus). So this amount of money might not be wasted but still not optimally spent. Which isn't 100% bad, but at least bittersweet.
If anything, without reviews and performance benchmarks, we might just get ExaFLOPS on paper.
Like how does one of these Rhea CPUs compare to, say, a Graviton 2/3 or to an Ampere Altra cpu?