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Tachyum is enabling human brain-scale AI and advancing the entire world to a greener era, by delivering the world’s first universal processor.

Newsletter

Volume 2, Number 2, May 2022

Prologue picture

Dr. Radoslav Danilak, Founder and CEO of Tachyum

It’s my pleasure to write to you at a time when we are preparing for the launch of the world’s first universal processor: Tachyum Prodigy.

We’ve reached a long-awaited milestone. Prodigy’s design shows stability and is able to run for a very long time without crashing. We demonstrated applications running in Linux interactive mode on Prodigy FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) hardware. This milestone is a critical turning point towards the final stage in the development of the Prodigy chip.

Tachyum’s software team achieved significant developments that advance the capabilities of our Prodigy processor as we continue to progress towards production-ready status. We completed the first installment of a FreeBSD port to Prodigy’s ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), enabled KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor virtualization, improved Prodigy’s UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) specification-based BIOS replacement firmware, and incorporated the latest versions of the QEMU emulator and GNU Compiler Collection.

We successfully replaced the DDR5, PCI Express 5.0, and 112G SERDES IPs. The transition to new IPs is now successfully complete and the new IPs are integrated.

With stability achieved on FPGA hardware, we start the hardware testing phase: Quality Assurance (QA). In the existing verification environment, we collected billions of test cycles that allowed us to validate the stability of FPGA hardware. With the transition to QA at FPGA we will be able to start collecting trillions of test cycles to start ramping up testing before tape-out this year.

We are also expanding the portfolio of future customers and partners. Among others, we entered into formal agreements with two state-of-the-art supercomputer centers in Europe: Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre. We were honoured to be visited by the Taiwan delegation during their visit to Slovakia.

We are eager to bring Tachyum Prodigy to market and revolutionize the concept of a data center, forever. Stay tuned, we will unveil product numbers soon and you will be among the first to be informed.

Tachyum can help Slovakia transform its economy

Semiconductor experts from Taiwan visited our company

The Slovak economy is known worldwide mainly for its automobile manufacturing industry. To diversify and strengthen Slovak economic development, it will be crucial to transition from a manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. Tachyum’s semiconductor R&D and its product development can be an important factor in achieving this transition. This was confirmed by members of the Taiwanese delegation, who visited Tachyum’s Bratislava offices in late March.

Taiwan’s experience with transforming from a labor-intensive economy into an innovation-driven economy, and along the way, earning its position as the world’s biggest hub for the semiconductor industry can be a great inspiration for Slovakia.

Read more...
Delegation was led by Mr. Pei-Zen Chang, Executive Vice President of ITRI

Delegation was led by Mr. Pei-Zen Chang, Executive Vice President of ITRI

Milestones Achieved

Prodigy Running Applications in Linux Interactive Mode

We have progressed to running applications in Linux interactive mode with SMP Linux and the floating-point unit enabled on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) prototype of our Prodigy Universal Processor. This milestone showcases Prodigy’s advanced level of maturity spanning its advanced CPU core, powerful software environment, and new third party hardware IP, bringing the company closer to product launch.

Successfully running interactively proves the stability of the system and allows the company to move forward with additional testing before advancing to tape out and sampling later this year. With the replacement IP successfully integrated, Tachyum is able to continue building towards full production and profitability prior to launching an IPO.

Watch a video demonstration of Linux user session running interactively on Prodigy FPGA here…

FreeBSD Successfully Runs in Prodigy Ecosystem

We have completed validation of Prodigy processor and software ecosystem with the operating system FreeBSD, and completed the Prodigy instruction set architecture (ISA) for FreeBSD porting. FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms. It is the platform of choice for many of the busiest websites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices. With this addition, Tachyum now covers all customer OS needs.

Watch a video demonstration of FreeBSD running on Prodigy here…

Native KVM Virtualization on Prodigy Emulation

Another progress achieved in Prodigy software ecosystem was enabling of KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor virtualization that empowers data center providers with the ability to execute several instances of a bare-metal OS on the same machine with minimal overhead. This Day One functionality massively reduces the cost and the power requirements of data center, AI and HPC workloads.

Watch a video demonstration of KVM running on a Prodigy emulation platform here…

System Software Advancement To Pre-Production State

Among the enhancements to Prodigy processor are improvements to its Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification-based BIOS (Basic Input Output System) replacement firmware and the incorporation of the latest versions of the QEMU emulator and GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These improvements will allow for quick and seamless integration of technologies into Tachyum-based environments when deployed in data centers.

Watch a video detailing the latest enhancements here…

Tachyum Will Collaborate with Top Supercomputing Centers in Europe

Tachyum announced two important Memorandums of Understanding with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) to collaborate on open supercomputing projects, scientific research, and innovations in artificial intelligence. Both supercomputing centers will test an HPC infrastructure based on the Tachyum platform.

Barcelona Supercomputing Center is the national supercomputing center in Spain. BSC specializes in high-performance computing (HPC) and manage MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, located in the Torre Girona chapel. With a total staff of more than 750 R&D experts and professionals, BSC has been successful in attracting talent in research fields including Computer Sciences, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences and Computer Applications in Science and Engineering.

Decorative quotemark

“By signing a memorandum of understanding, BSC has the opportunity to evaluate HPC infrastructure backed by the Prodigy Universal Processor, a potential tool to add to your computing infrastructure that could enable our staff achieve their goals better than ever before.“

Prof. Mateo Valero, Director of BSC

Radoslav Danilak and Robert Cisar in BSC

Read more about MoU with BSC here…

Another recently signed agreement was with the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. JSC will test an HPC infrastructure based on the Tachyum platform with both parties collaborating on projects in fields including biosciences, progressive materials, energetics through Al and their transfer into industrial technology.

Decorative quotemark

“Prodigy was designed to largely avoid silicon underutilization, which is what makes the processor so attractive for energy-efficient simulations, data analytics and AI applications.“

Prof. Thomas Lippert, Director of JSC

Dr. Radoslav Danilak with Prof. Dr. Thomas Lippert, JSC Director and Dr. Estela Suarez, member of Technology division

Read more about MoU with JSC here…

Tachyum Advisor Steve Furber Wins 2022 Draper Prize for Engineering

We are happy to announce that Tachyum Corporate Advisory Board Member Steve Furber was one of the 2022 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering award winners “for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) chips” by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Established in 1988 to honor the memory of Charles Stark Draper, the “father of inertial navigation,” the Draper Prize is awarded biennially to honor those who provide significant contributions to engineering and technology. Furber was recognized for helping to advance the commercialization of RISC chips at U.K. company Acorn by designing the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) microprocessor. About 99 percent of today’s embedded computing systems use the RISC architecture.

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“It is quite an honour to be recognized for my work in advancing RISC technology in general, and the ARM processor specifically, by the NAE in bestowing on me the prestigious Draper Prize for Engineering.”

Steve Furber

“I believe that many of the advances we were able to make in forwarding this work are being carried on at innovative companies such as Tachyum, which is leveraging low-power, high-performance chips to enable human brain-scale AI to revolutionize the world,” said Professor Furber.

Read more...
Professor Furber in front of the SpiNNaker machine at University of Manchester

Professor Furber in front of the SpiNNaker machine at University of Manchester
 

Tachyum named Among the Most Innovative Artificial Intelligence Solutions Providers to Watch

Tachyum was highlighted as one of the “Most Innovative Artificial Intelligence Solutions Providers to Watch” by The Enterprise World and earned the featured cover story with an in-depth discussion about the company, our leadership, vision of the industry and the AI attributes of our Prodigy™ universal processor.

Decorative quotemark

“As AI migrates to more sophisticated and control- intensive disciplines, such as Spiking Neural Nets, Explainable AI, Symbolic AI and Bio AI, Prodigy will deliver an order of magnitude better performance than its competitors.”

Radoslav Danilak

The Enterprise World, with its wide topics for every month, brings to readers new and changing trends in business, market growth, changing government reforms and the growing customer base of a particular industry.

The article is available in the February 2022 issue of The Enterprise World.

Radoslav Danilak on the cover of February 2022 issue of The Enterprise World

Radoslav Danilak on the cover of February 2022 issue of The Enterprise World

Events

LECTURE SERIES: Supercomputing in science - Reinforcement Learning

LECTURE SERIES: Supercomputing in science - Reinforcement Learning

May 10, 2022, Bratislava, Slovak Academy of Sciences

Michal Chovanec, AI Researcher at Tachyum, led the lecture at Slovak Academy of Science (SAS) in the lectures series organized by SAS and the National Competence Center. He explained the definition of RL (Reinforcement Learning), the differences between supervised and reinforcement learning, and training on a reward and punishment mechanism. See the presentation here.

ISC High Performance 2022

ISC High Performance 2022

May 29 - June 2, 2022, Hamburg, Germany

Tachyum took part in ISC High Performance 2022 Exhibition and conference. Rob Reiner presented at the HPC Solutions Forum on theme “The Convergence of HPC and AI in a Software Composable Homogenous Data Center”.

Along with Slavo Matasovsky, Senior AI Architect at Tachyum, they showcased Prodigy’s advanced AI features with a virtual product demonstration that highlighted its ability to scale deep learning by utilizing low-precision data types and sparsity to optimize performance and memory utilization.

Spring ITAPA 2022 Conference

Spring ITAPA 2022 Conference

June 16 - 17, 2022, Bratislava, Slovakia

Tachyum was a part of Spring ITAPA, the leading conference on digitization and new technologies in Slovakia. Dr. Radoslav Danilak, discussed with other thought leaders about megatrends of the new world.

“Paradoxically, the new world of chaos may be a rare historical opportunity for Slovakia to deeply transform its growth paradigm to achieve greater prosperity, sustainability, productivity and change the region into a home of talent and innovation. Slovakia must choose one domain where it could set the tone. A domain where everyone is on the same starting line. This could be artificial intelligence (AI) and the fastest AI supercomputer in the world that can be built at a price that Slovakia can afford. If Slovakia does not leave its comfort zone and remains satisfied with the average results, it will be in the perception of the world as a country neighboring the war, which deserves credit for helping its neighbor, but has not brought anything new to the world,“ said Radoslav Danilak.

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Tachyum® and Tachyum Prodigy®, TPU® are trademarks of Tachyum Ltd, registered in the United States and other countries. All other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective owners. This document is provided for informational purposes only. All statements regarding Tachyum's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only. © 2019-2024 Tachyum, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Tachyum s.r.o., Karadžičova 14, 821 08 Bratislava, Slovak Republic, EU

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