Oct. 23, 2025 –
At the recent EPI Forum 2025 in Paris, SiPearl introduced Athena1, designed for government, defense, and aerospace applications.
By Anne-Françoise Pelé, EETimes Europe
At the recent EPI Forum 2025 in Paris, SiPearl introduced Athena1, named after the Greek goddess of wisdom and war. The processor is designed for government, defense, and aerospace applications, extending the company’s first-generation Rhea1—originally developed for high-performance computing (HPC)—into domains where security, data integrity, and operational robustness are essential.
SiPearl’s Rhea1 processor completed tapeout in June 2025. Manufacturing is planned on TSMC’s 6-nm process, and it is expected to be deployed in Jupiter, the European exascale system hosted by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, by the end of 2026.
Athena1 builds on Rhea1’s architecture but is reconfigured to meet the specific constraints of dual-use systems. According to SiPearl, the new processor will be available in configurations with 16, 32, 48, 64, or 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, depending on the computing power and thermal requirements of each deployment.