Sipearl has been developing a custom CPU, especially designed for high-performance workloads, named 'Rhea', for over five years. In late May, it was finally announced that the company had received the CPU from the fab, initiating the bring-up process, which is a significant milestone. The HPC CPU sports over 80 cores, in addition to an innovative memory subsystem. We spoke directly with Craig Prunty, vice president of marketing and business development of SiPearl, to learn the fine-grained details.

The Rhea CPU is intended to reach markets by late 2026 or early 2027, and won't be the most performant HPC CPU on the market. Regardless, SiPearl told us at Computex that there is interest both towards Rhea and its successors from rather unexpected parties, so the company is in with a chance to become a successful CPU designer over time.