Tachyum Inc. announced that it has taken delivery of an IO motherboard for its Prodigy Universal Processor hardware emulator from manufacturing. This provides the company with a complete system prototype integrating CPU, memory, PCI Express, networking and BMC management subsystems when connected to the previously announced field-programmable gate array (FPGA) emulation system board.
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“Once again we have achieved a major milestone in the development of the world’s first universal processor”
The Tachyum Prodigy FPGA DDR-IO Board connects to the Prodigy FPGA CPU Board to provide memory and IO connectivity for the FPGA-based CPU tiles. The fully functional Prodigy emulation system is now ready for further build out, including Linux boot and incorporation of additional test chips. It is available to customers to perform early testing and software development prior to a full four-socket reference design motherboard, which is expected to be available Q4 2021.
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The FPGA DDR-IO Board delivers the following advanced functionality to support high-performance connectivity and enhanced management for the FPGA CPU Board:
- 4 channels of DDR4 supporting 2 DIMMs per channel for a total of 8 DIMMs
- 32 lanes of PCIe 3.0 with 4 PCIe connectors
- Aspeed AST2600 Baseboard Management Controller (BMC)
- OCP System Control Module (SCM)
- Multiple additional interfaces that include a 1 GbE management port, 2 USB ports and UARTs
- Flexibility to be configured to accommodate test chips for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 to fully test the Prodigy design
The delivery of the IO motherboard for the Prodigy FPGA prototype provides the platform necessary to perform IO device porting and IO compatibility testing prior to tape out. Additionally, this delivery allows for the testing and validation of 5nm test chips from Tachyum IP suppliers.
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Tachyum will provide access to the FPGA prototype for early adopter partners, allowing them to finalize any changes to their software stacks before full chip production begins. The next step in the process will be to demonstrate functionality of the whole system before sampling later this year.
“Once again we have achieved a major milestone in the development of the world’s first universal processor,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, co-founder and CEO of Tachyum. “Our IO motherboard, in conjunction with our CPU motherboard, enables our engineers to fully test the functionality of Prodigy. Together, these two FPGA-based boards provide the basis of a system that can be cascaded to fully emulate an entire 128-core Prodigy processor, which is capable of advancing the entire world to a greener era by enabling human brain-scale AI.”
Tachyum’s Prodigy processor 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. Prodigy’s ability to seamlessly switch among these various workloads dramatically changes the competitive landscape and the economics of data centers.
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As the world’s first universal processor, Prodigy runs legacy x86, ARM and RISC-V binaries in addition to its native Prodigy code. With a single homogeneous, 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.
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.
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