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Press Release
LAS VEGAS, January 3, 2023 – Tachyum™ ended 2022 with accomplishments including the worldwide debut of Prodigy®, the world’s first universal processor for high-performance computing and more than a dozen commercialization partnerships, effectively moving the startup to a leadership position in semiconductors.
2022 marked the introduction of Tachyum’s Prodigy to the commercial market. Prodigy exceeded its performance targets and is significantly faster than any processors currently available in hyperscale, HPC and AI markets. With its higher performance and performance per-dollar and per-watt, Tachyum’s Prodigy processor will enable the world’s fastest AI supercomputer, currently in planning stages.
Tachyum signed 14 significant MOUs with prestigious universities, research institutes, and innovative companies like the Faculty of Information Technology at Czech Technical University in Prague, Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies, M Computers, Picacity, LuxProvide S.A. (Meluxina supercomputer), MatLogica, and Cologne Chip. Other agreements are in progress.
The launch of Prodigy followed the successful preproduction and Quality Assurance (QA) phases for hardware and software testing on FPGA emulation boards. During 2022, Tachyum successfully demonstrated Prodigy’s integration with major platforms to address multiple customer needs. These included FreeBSD, Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor virtualization, and native Docker under the Go programming language (Golang).
Software ecosystem enhancements also included improvements to Prodigy’s Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification-based BIOS (Basic Input Output System) replacement firmware, incorporating the latest versions of the QEMU emulator and GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These improvements allow quick and seamless integration of data center technologies into Tachyum-based environments.
Tachyum completed the final piece of its core software stack with a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) running on a Prodigy emulation system. This enables Tachyum to provide OEM/ODM and system integrators with complete software and firmware stack, and serves as a key component of the upcoming Tachyum Prodigy 4 socket reference design.
In its hardware accomplishments, Tachyum built its IEEE-compliant floating-point unit (FPU) from the ground up — one of the most advanced in the world, with the highest clock speeds — and progressed to running applications in Linux interactive mode on Prodigy FPGA hardware with SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) Linux and the FPU. This proved the stability of the system and allowed Tachyum to move forward with additional testing. It completed LINPACK benchmarks using Prodigy’s FPU on a FPGA. LINPACK measures a system’s floating-point computing power by solving a dense system of linear equations to determine performance. It is a widely used benchmark for supercomputers.
The company published three technical white papers that unveiled never-before-disclosed architectural designs of the system-on-chip (SOC) and AI training techniques, revealing how Prodigy addresses trends in AI, enables deep learning workloads that are more environmentally responsible with lower energy consumption and reduced carbon emissions. One paper defined a groundbreaking high-performance, low-latency, low-cost, low-power, highly scalable exascale-flattened networking solution that provides a superior alternative to the more expensive, proprietary and limited scalability InfiniBand communications standard.
Tachyum was a highlight of exhibits at Expo 2020 Dubai with the world premiere of the Prodigy Universal Processor for supercomputers, and presented Prodigy at LEAP22 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Tachyum was named one of the Most Innovative AI Solutions Providers to watch by Enterprise World. Company executives were among the featured presenters at ISC High Performance 2022 and Supercomputing 2022 events.
“Our technical teams have accomplished a great deal this year, and the results speak to it: Prodigy is faster than any other processor for the hyperscale, HPC and AI markets,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, founder and CEO of Tachyum. “As we move to the commercialization stage and start our C round, 2023 will see a new era in data center computing, an end to extreme power consumption, resource underutilization, and the merciful death of the processor performance plateau that has stymied modern applications and stifled innovation.”
With its Series C funding, expected to close in 2023, Tachyum will finance the volume production of Prodigy Universal Processor Chip and be positioned for sustained profitability, as well as increase headcount.
2023 will see the company move to tape-out, silicon samples, production, and shipments. After running LINPACK benchmarks using Prodigy’s FPU on a FPGA there are only four more steps to go before the final netlist of Prodigy: running UEFI and boot loaders loading Linux on the FPGA, completing vector-based LINPACK testing with I/O, followed by I/O with virtualization, RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability).
Prodigy delivers unprecedented data center performance, power, and economics, reducing CAPEX and OPEX significantly. Because of its utility for both high-performance and line-of-business applications, Prodigy-powered data center servers can seamlessly and dynamically switch between workloads, eliminating the need for expensive dedicated AI hardware and dramatically increasing server utilization. Tachyum’s Prodigy integrates 128 high-performance custom-designed 64-bit compute cores, to deliver up to 4x the performance of the highest-performing x86 processors for cloud workloads, up to 3x that of the highest performing GPU for HPC, and 6x for AI applications.
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Tachyum is transforming AI, HPC, public and private cloud data center markets with its recently launched flagship product. Prodigy, the world’s first Universal Processor, unifies the functionality of a CPU, a GPU, and a TPU into a single processor that delivers industry-leading performance, cost, and power efficiency for both specialty and general-purpose computing. When Prodigy processors are provisioned in a hyperscale data center, they enable all AI, HPC, and general-purpose applications to run on one hardware infrastructure, saving companies billions of dollars per year. With data centers currently consuming over 4% of the planet’s electricity, predicted to be 10% by 2030, the ultra-low power Prodigy Universal Processor is critical to continue doubling worldwide data center capacity every four years. Tachyum, co-founded by Dr. Radoslav Danilak is building the world’s fastest AI supercomputer (128 AI exaflops) in the EU based on Prodigy processors. Tachyum has offices in the United States and Slovakia. For more information, visit https://www.tachyum.com/.