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Press Release
LAS VEGAS, September 19, 2023 – Tachyum® today announced the expansion of its Prodigy software ecosystem with the addition of LLVM for AI and Linux Rust support. This is the latest addition to an already rich and robust collection of applications, system software, frameworks and libraries running under QEMU emulation and tested by FPGA emulation in advance of Prodigy chip production.
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies. Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on performance, type safety and concurrency, and has become the second language officially accepted for Linux kernel development.
LLVM plays a large role in every major AI framework, including PyTorch and TensorFlow, with their AI compilers based on LLVM for native instruction generation. Additionally, standalone AI compilers, like Apache TVM, are also based on the LLVM compiler infrastructure. An LLVM backend supports the Tachyum ISA, particularly vector and tensor instructions in both full and low precisions, allowing it to take full advantage of Prodigy’s hardware features that are specifically designed to boost AI workload performance. This AI compiler backend provides the ultimate performance for inference applications.
With Rust, Linux developers can create new functionality faster and with greater confidence. It is both fast and memory efficient. Its rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory and thread safety. Rust is being incorporated into Prodigy’s Linux kernel, relying on LLVM. Support for GCC Rust will come later when the language becomes readily available.
“As impressive as the hardware architecture of the Tachyum Prodigy Universal Processor is, it is the software that we support that will allow customers and partners to unlock the full potential of the chip,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, founder and CEO of Tachyum. “With initial availability of LLVM planned for the first quarter of 2024, I am proud of our software engineering team’s efforts to have it available ahead of schedule. Our team is now hard at work building Tachyum software distribution images, and a quarter after the alpha release, a beta version will be available for our customers to test.”
As a Universal Processor offering utility for all workloads, Prodigy-powered data center servers can seamlessly and dynamically switch between computational domains (such as AI/ML, HPC, and cloud) on a single architecture. By eliminating the need for expensive dedicated AI hardware and dramatically increasing server utilization, Prodigy reduces CAPEX and OPEX significantly while delivering unprecedented data center performance, power, and economics. Prodigy integrates 192 high-performance custom-designed 64-bit compute cores, to deliver up to 4.5x 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.
A video demonstration of LLVM running on Prodigy is available below.
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Tachyum is transforming the economics of AI, HPC, public and private cloud workloads with Prodigy, the world’s first Universal Processor. Prodigy unifies the functionality of a CPU, a GPGPU, and a TPU in a single processor that delivers industry-leading performance, cost, and power efficiency for both specialty and general-purpose computing. When hyperscale data centers are provisioned with Prodigy, all AI, HPC, and general-purpose applications can run on the same infrastructure, saving companies billions of dollars in hardware, footprint, and operational expenses. As global data center emissions contribute to a changing climate, and consume more than four percent of the world’s electricity—projected to be 10 percent by 2030—the ultra-low power Prodigy Universal Processor is a potential breakthrough for satisfying the world’s appetite for computing at a lower environmental cost. Prodigy, now in its final stages of testing and integration before volume manufacturing, is being adopted in prototype form by a rapidly growing customer base, and robust purchase orders signal a likely IPO in late 2024. Tachyum has offices in the United States and Slovakia. For more information, visit https://www.tachyum.com/.