Tachyum Inc. today announced that its Prodigy Universal Processor has successfully completed software emulation testing across x86, ARM and RISC-V binary environments. This important milestone demonstrates that Prodigy will enable customers to run their legacy applications transparently at launch with better performance than any contemporary or future ARM or RISC-V processors. Coupled with hyperscale data center workhorse programs such as Hadoop, Apache and more, which Tachyum is recompiling to Prodigy native code, this capability will ensure that Prodigy customers can run a broad spectrum of applications, right out of the box. Tachyum customers consistently indicate that they would run 100% native applications within 9-18 months of transitioning to the Tachyum platform to exceed performance of the fastest Xeon processor. The emulation is to smoothly transition to native software for Tachyum Prodigy.
Tachyum is working on native Linux distribution with many applications in time for the Prodigy launch in 2021. For convenience, Tachyum also provides the ability to transparently install and run legacy applications using a dynamic binary translator that converts x86, ARM or RISC-V code to Prodigy native ISA (Instruction Set Architecture). Despite software emulation on the Prodigy chip, the ARM and RISC-V binaries will run much faster on Tachyum Prodigy than on ARM or RISC-V available today. This is a testament to the raw brute force performance of the Prodigy processor.
One of the demonstrations ran a web server application on Prodigy using a mix of native and x86 code. The results proved that Prodigy is capable of running heterogenous system applications efficiently on the same universal silicon, which will provide huge cost benefits to a broad spectrum of users. We will be releasing a series of demonstration videos in the near future, with the first one showing demonstrations running native, x86, ARM and RISC-V binaries on Prodigy emulation at https://www.tachyum.com/resources
Tachyum’s Prodigy can run HPC applications, convolution AI, explainable AI, general AI, bio AI and spiking neural networks, as well as normal data center workloads on a single homogeneous processor platform with its simple programming model. Using CPU, GPU, TPU and other accelerators in lieu of Prodigy for these different types of workloads is inefficient. A heterogeneous processing fabric, with unique hardware dedicated to each type of workload (e.g. data center, AI, HPC), results in underutilization of hardware resources, and a more challenging programming environment. Prodigy’s ability to seamlessly switch among these various workloads dramatically changes the competitive landscape and the economics of data centers.
Prodigy significantly improves computational performance, energy consumption, hardware (server) utilization and space requirements compared to existing chips provisioned in hyperscale data centers today. It will also allow Edge developers for IoT to exploit its low power / high performance, along with its simple programming model to deliver AI to the edge.
Prodigy is truly a universal processor. In addition to native Prodigy code, it also runs legacy x86, ARM and RISC-V binaries. And, with a single, highly-efficient processor architecture, Prodigy delivers industry-leading performance across data center, AI, and HPC workloads.
“Having a readily available solution and easy to use with massive amounts of software, demonstrates the foundation for success of a platform,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, Tachyum founder and CEO. “This demonstration of Prodigy’s ability to run software correctly – even legacy code from x86, ARM or RISC-V processors – shows that we will enable customers to seamlessly use the applications they are using today from Day One of Prodigy’s launch. This is another validation of viability for Prodigy and proof of its ability to unlock unprecedented performance, power efficiency and cost advantages across the most challenging computing environments.”
Prodigy, the company’s flagship Universal Processor, will enter volume production in 2021. In April the Prodigy chip successfully proved its viability with a complete chip layout exceeding speed targets. In August the processor is able to correctly execute short programs, with results automatically verified against the software model, while exceeding the target clock speed. The next step is to get a manufactured wholy functional FPGA prototype of the chip later this year, which is the last milestone before tape-out.
Prodigy outperforms the fastest Xeon processors at 10x lower power on data center workloads, as well as outperforming NVIDIA’s fastest GPU on HPC, AI training and inference. The 125 HPC Prodigy racks can deliver a 32 tensor EXAFLOPS. Prodigy’s 3X lower cost per MIPS and 10X lower power translates to a 4X lower data center Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), enables billions of dollars of savings for hyperscalers such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, and others. 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, because the servers have already been amortized.
