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Press Release
SANTA CLARA, Calif., October 5, 2020 – Tachyum™ Inc. today announced that is has added Melvin Cordova, a veteran and proven executive in the defense and intelligence technology industry, to the advisory board of its newly created Tachyum Government Corporation. Mr. Cordova carries the appropriate security clearances and will serve as the official contact for federal customers looking to leverage Tachyum’s Prodigy Universal Processor for their demanding HPC, artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads.
With more than 30 years of experience leading military and intelligence innovation, managing critical programs, and building consensus within the defense and intelligence industries, Cordova specializes in providing operational advisory services to technology companies doing business with the Department of Defense and intelligence community organizations. His focus is on identifying emerging threats and managing the velocity and complexity of technology innovation for high-stakes environments to counter those threats.
Cordova served 22 years on active duty in the United States Navy, in the fields of electricity, electronics, and interior communications. Among his professional experience, he served eight-years as a GG-15 at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in roles that include; Secretariat for the Innovation Advisory Board, Office of the Deputy Director; Senior Program Manager for the Technology Action Group, Office of the Chief of Staff, DIA, addressing the most difficult problems of IT, Analysis, MASINT, and HUMINT. Cordova led DoD’s investments in In-Q-Tel’s (CIA’s Venture Capital arm) portfolio companies, managed DIA participation in military exercises and led the transition of several important technologies to fully qualified operational use. These efforts earned him recognition from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) for his collaboration and leadership. Cordova also served 3-1/2 years in the Defense HUMINT Management Office, Technology Tradecraft Office, as senior program manager, deputy chief and acting chief. He also served as Chief of the DIA Contracting Office in Baghdad, Iraq, providing oversight for all Iraq Survey Group contracts.
Tachyum has seen a dramatic rise in interest from government agencies – notably US and NATO government entities – in the company’s disruptive products. Prodigy’s ultra- low-power, ultra-high-performance enables and vastly improves next-generation defense systems such as unmanned aircraft and underwater systems, cybersecurity, communications, analytics, and more.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Richard Zahner is a career electronic intelligence specialist who headed signals intelligence at the National Security Agency (NSA) and ended his career as Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence. He said “(Prodigy’s) unique attributes set the conditions to create a computing architecture fully aligned with the operational and strategic imperatives of our national strategy. The new microchip could help restore America’s technological edge. This sort of re-levels the playing field potentially in our favor.”
Cordova’s involvement with Tachyum significantly helps the company fulfill its need for seasoned executives with active clearances, who have experience navigating military and intelligence programs and organizations. Tachyum is currently performing evaluation testing and benchmarking for national labs. Additionally, multiple government entities have expressed interest in purchasing reference boards within the next year to evaluate and qualify Prodigy for government customers. Mr. Cordova will be Tachyum’s primary interface for federal customer activity, including classified programs.
Demanding AI/ML applications are currently run on specialty, single-purpose chips such as GPU and TPU, while CPUs power conventional workloads – resulting in high costs and inefficiency due to dual infrastructures. Instead, Tachyum’s Prodigy supports both on a single homogeneous processor platform with its simple programming model. Prodigy’s ability to seamlessly switch among various workloads (e.g CPU, AI training and inference, and HPC) dramatically changes the competitive landscape and the economics of data centers.
Prodigy outperforms today‘s fastest Xeon processors while consuming 10x lower power on data center workloads (core vs. core), and outperforms NVIDIA’s fastest GPU (A100) on AI training and inferencing. A mere 125 HPC Prodigy racks can deliver 32 tensor ExaFLOPS. Prodigy’s 3x lower cost per MIPS and 10x lower core power translate to a 4x lower data center Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), enabling savings of millions to billions of dollars.
“Governement agencies represent an incredible market opportunity for Prodigy as there is an ever-increasing need for AI supercomputers within this space to keep up with advances being implemented throughout the world,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, Tachyum founder and CEO. “Mel offers us years of experience and unparelleled expertise in dealing with the often-times complicated world of defense contracts. His addition as our primary contact and a member of the Tachyum Government Corp. Advisory Board ensures that government customers are not left waiting for the opportunity to leverage Prodigy as part of their computing projects when it becomes available next year.”
A Tachyum supercomputer reference design will be available in the second half of 2021, with third-party system partners have their designs available 1 to 2 quarters later. Sampling is expected at the end of the Q2 in 2021, with volume production occuring after a final metal stepping. For more information on Tachyum Government, please visit https://www.tachyum.us
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Tachyum is disrupting data centers, HPC and AI markets by providing universality, industry leading performance, cost and power, while enabling data centers that are more powerful than the human brain. Tachyum, co-founded by Dr. Radoslav Danilak, and its flagship product Prodigy, the world’s first and only universal processor, begins production in 2021. Prodigy brings unprecedented value targeting a $50B market that is growing at 20% per year. With data centers currently consuming over 3% of the planet’s electricity, and 10% by 2025, low power Prodigy is critical for the continued doubling of worldwide data center capacity every 4 years. Tachyum has offices in the USA and Slovakia, EU.