Summertime is traditionally a quiet time for companies, but not for us. At Tachyum, we have started to ramp up hiring to support the company’s growth. We have recently opened new positions for highly qualified professionals to serve as CPU hardware design and verification engineers and specialists for advanced AI topics. New positions are also open for Tachyum’s Slovakian R&D campus, comprising of modern Class-A offices with an internal data center and laboratory in Bratislava. We anticipate opening further positions in the US and potentially in other locations globally.

In the second quarter of 2024, Tachyum’s achievements included a series of progressive milestones and moved its Prodigy software distribution, a completely integrated software stack and package, into beta testing. Quality completion of Prodigy’s software stack is a key component as we continue to advance towards chip production and distribution.

After advancing the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) to beta, Tachyum added RAID capabilities to Prodigy. RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a way of storing the same data across multiple hard drives (HDDs) or solid-state drives (SSDs) to protect data in case of a drive failure by creating redundancy and improving performance.

Furthermore, we integrated the BF16 data type into the Prodigy compiler and software distribution, which is now available to early adopters and customers as a pre-installed image as part of beta testing. This week we also announced that BF16 has been successfully tested and verified operational on our Prodigy FPGA prototype, ensuring increased throughput for users’ high-performance processing needs. BF16, or bfloat16, is a shortened floating point data type. As the default of our Prodigy software distribution, we have moved to 64KB memory page size.

Tachyum’s engineers started to test Git access to Tachyum software repositories. Git is an open-source distributed control system designed to track modifications in source code during software development. Until Tachyum OSS (Open-Source Software) is upstream, we will maintain Git repositories for public access, initially for our close partners. Currently, only the most recent version will be available. After production release, we will maintain multiple software versions. As part of the testing process, we will also donate hardware to the OSS community for expanded evaluation opportunities.

On the hardware side, Tachyum’s engineers added a watchdog timer to the Prodigy FPGA emulation system to help detect and recover from device or system malfunction. Watchdog is a mechanism that resets a computer if something goes wrong.

We also enabled an Instruction Profiling Unit (IPU), a low overhead way to collect the profile of non-instrumented executed code, on the Prodigy Universal Processor. IPU is used by hyperscalers to profile applications in production execution and recompile code to gain better performance.

We have also been busy this summer preparing for two prestigious events – IC China hosted by China Semiconductor Industry Association and Supercomputing (SC) 24 in the US, the international conference and exhibition for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. We look forward to sharing more information and our direct experience in subsequent newsletters.