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Press Release
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 12, 2019 – Tachyum today announced that it has received capital from the Slovak government of almost $17 million dollars to help build a new R&D center within the country that will assist in the final development phase of the company’s Prodigy Universal Processor Chip, the smallest and fastest general-purpose, 64-bit processor, requiring 10x lower power and 3x lower sell price than competing products with equivalent performance. Together, these two attributes result in Prodigy reducing data center annual total cost of ownership (CapEx + OpEx) by a factor of 4x.
With one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe, the Slovak Republic continues to position itself as a technology hub within the EU in the fields of AI (artificial intelligence) and HPC (high-performance computing). The financial support provided by the Slovak government to build the new R&D center will help expedite the completion of Tachyum’s new proprietary processor architecture that will allow system integrators to build a 32 Exaflops AI supercomputer in 2020, well ahead of the EU’s stated goal of 2028. Prodigy currently has the best performing processor design in the world.
Around 150 highly qualified professional are expected to be hired to work at Tachyum’s Slovakia-based R&D center, with hundreds of more job opportunities becoming available for skilled professionals as future Prodigy applications are developed. Tachyum’s new facilities will also provide coordination for the company’s overall business activities, and its global support services.
“With the Slovak government looking to back top technology projects and the emerging companies behind them, I am pleased that they have decided to support our project, which represents a unique opportunity for both Slovakia and the European Union,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, Co-founder and CEO of Tachyum. “The creation of an R&D center in Slovakia will help to develop the whole ecosystem around solutions in the field of artificial intelligence and supercomputers. I am convinced that together we will achieve a strong leadership position inside the EU as it looks to develop mission-critical high-performance, scalable AI and HPC solutions.”
Tachyum’s Prodigy microprocessor project is coming to Slovakia also thanks to the IPM investment fund, which was the first and currently is the lead investor in Tachyum. “In this project we see a unique opportunity to catch up with world leaders in the field of microprocessors. Our philosophy is to bring top world talent to Central Europe while taking advantage of the potential here. The ecosystem thus created will become a new stable pillar of the economy and make Slovakia a more attractive place as a technology hub. It will benefit the EU going forward,” said Adrian Vycital, Tachyum Board Member and Managing Partner of IPM Group.
Tachyum has previously built strategic relationships with EU partners that will enable the EU to exploit the unprecedented capabilities of the Prodigy Universal Processor Chip. Tachyum’s Prodigy processor reduces data center processor power by an order of magnitude, through a disruptive hardware architecture and a smart compiler that has made many parts of the hardware found in a typical processor redundant. Fewer and shorter wires, due to a smaller, simpler core, translates into much greater speed and power efficiency for the processor.
Approved by the Slovak government March 6, the financial support provided to build out Tachyum’s R&D center comes via a low-interest, 10-year loan with a deferred repayment beginning after 4 years.
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Named for the Greek prefix “tachy,” meaning speed, combined with the suffix “-um,” indicating an element (e.g. lithium), Tachyum is meant to evoke the notion of “an element of speed”. Tachyum emerged from stealth mode in 2017 to engineer disruptive intelligent information processing products. Tachyum’s founders have a track record of solving problems caused by device physics in semiconductors, to deliver transformational products to global markets, and are backed by IPM Growth, the Central & Eastern European venture capital platform, as Tachyum’s lead investor.