Tachyum Testing Applications on Prodigy FPGA

LAS VEGAS, June 1, 2023 – Tachyum™ announced today it has achieved another milestone on the road to commercialization of Prodigy, the world’s first Universal Processor, as it begins testing key applications on Prodigy FPGA prototypes.

Having recently completed the porting and testing necessary for system-software like UEFI, BMC, bootloader, and operating systems through the toolchains, Tachyum has now completed porting of other applications to test a wide range of workloads on the FPGA prototype. When applications are verified to run cleanly on the Prodigy FPGA, the Prodigy chip will be ready for tape-out and volume manufacturing.

To accelerate application testing, Tachyum has invented and developed a new infrastructure for regression testing, to capture FPGA execution and bugs in the first instance. With this new system, engineers avoid the necessity of manually reproducing bugs, a very time-consuming process that can delay development schedules. This infrastructure is essential for bugs which occur after trillions of cycles, which would take a very long time to debug. Some bugs are so rare that they are very hard to reproduce, and sometimes cannot be manually reproduced. Catching bugs on their first occurrence is the key to getting the chip ready for production quickly. Engineers can take traces from the Prodigy FPGA prototype, run trillions of cycles in a C-model called “cyclerun“ and then feed the state from the C-model to the RTL simulation, which can run tens of millions of cycles, or more, before the bug manifests in RTL. The engineers can then debug in the RTL simulation, instead of using a very time-consuming signal tap on the FPGA.

“Validating applications necessarily follows completing the physical design of the chip and will help us verify Prodigy’s performance in customer and partner deployments,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, founder and CEO of Tachyum. “The pace at which our team is hitting milestones is a model for the semiconductor industry and shows our laser-focus on reaching tape-out and ultimately transforming the economics of data center computing.”

Tachyum has also verified Prodigy’s design against the most recent version of the industry-standard Berkeley TestFloat/SoftFloat package.

GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and toolchain are already running successfully on Prodigy FPGAs. For a video demonstrating GCC and toolchain on the Prodigy FPGA, and automated QA testing, watch the video below.

Prodigy delivers a revolutionary new architecture that unifies the functionality of CPU, GPGPU, and TPU into a single chip. As a Universal Processor, Prodigy provides both the high performance required for cloud and HPC/AI workloads within a single architecture. Because of its utility for all workloads, Prodigy-powered data center servers can seamlessly and dynamically switch between computational domains.

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 128 high-performance custom-designed 64-bit compute cores, to deliver up to 4x 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.

About Tachyum

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/.