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Press Release
SANTA CLARA, Calif., December 8, 2020 – Tachyum™ Inc. today announced that it is signing early adopter customers for its Prodigy Universal Processor prototype built using field-programmable gate array (FPGA) emulation system boards, expected to be back from manufacturing in January 2021. Tachyum created this pre-order program based on commercial and government early access customers expressing strong interest in purchasing Prodigy prototype FPGA emulation systems. For example, Government customer tests using classified data, cannot be performed on emulation systems that are shared or rented.
Customers can use Prodigy’s fully functional FPGA emulation for product evaluation, performance measurements, as well as software development and debug. A fully functional chip emulation (in FPGA-based hardware) is typically the last step before chip tape-out when the final design is submitted for fabrication in silicon. The Prodigy emulation system will help customers smooth the adoption curve for Prodigy in their existing or new data center and/or HPC systems that demand high performance, high utilization and low power.
“With all our focus now on preparing for tape-out, product launch, volume production, and shipping for revenue in 2021, it is time for our early adopters to begin work building their own native environments for HPC, AI and business applications,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, Tachyum founder and CEO. “We will be working closely with those customers interested in building large-scale installations and ‘Universal Computing’ solutions where Prodigy shines. Some of these initiatives are planned next year.”
Tachyum’s Prodigy emulation system has been developed in house to offer the best possible speeds and consists of FPGA and IO boards connected by cables in a rack. The Prodigy FPGA emulation system, with multiple boards, allows full chip, half chip, and small, two-board emulation systems ideal for native Prodigy software development. Some Prodigy FPGA systems will have test chips for DDR5, PCIE 5.0, chip-to-chip 112Gb interconnect PHYs, and PLLs to eliminate remaining risk. For systems used to prove whole chip functionality, UEFI, BMC, Linux, applications and measured performance on benchmarks will be provided.
Tachyum plans to ship Prodigy emulation systems to its first registered users in 1Q21. Due to long lead times on the FPGA components, the company advises interested parties to register and pre-order early.
Tachyum’s Prodigy can run HPC applications, convolutional AI, explainable AI, general AI, bio AI, and spiking neural networks, plus normal data center workloads, on a single homogeneous processor platform, using existing standard programming models. Without Prodigy, hyperscale data centers must use a combination of CPU, GPU, TPU hardware, for these different workloads, creating inefficiency, expense, and the complexity of separate supply and maintenance infrastructures. Using specific hardware dedicated to each type of workload (e.g. data center, AI, HPC), results in underutilization of hardware resources, and more challenging programming, support, and maintenance challenges. Prodigy’s ability to seamlessly switch among these various workloads dramatically changes the competitive landscape and the economics of data centers.
In hyperscale data centers, Prodigy significantly improves computational performance, energy consumption, hardware (server) utilization and space requirements, compared to existing processor chips currently provisioned. As the world’s first universal processor, it also runs legacy x86, ARM and RISC-V binaries in addition to its native Prodigy code. With a single, highly efficient processor architecture, Prodigy delivers industry-leading performance across data center, AI, and HPC workloads, outperforming the fastest Xeon processors while consuming 10x lower power (core vs. core), as well as outperforming NVIDIA’s fastest GPU in HPC, as well as AI training and inference. A mere 125 HPC Prodigy racks can deliver 32 tensor EXAFLOPS.
Prodigy’s 3X lower cost per MIPS and its 10X lower core power translate to a 4X lower data center Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), delivering billions of dollars in annual savings to hyperscalers. Since Prodigy is the world’s only processor that can switch between data center, AI and HPC workloads, unused servers can be used as CAPEX- free AI or HPC cloud resources, because the servers have already been amortized. Prodigy will also allow Edge developers for IoT to exploit its low power/high performance, along with its simple programming model, to deliver efficient high- performance AI to the edge.
To pre-order FPGA emulation systems, interested parties can visit https://www.tachyum.com/
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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.