This announcement proves the stability of the Prodigy emulation system and will allow the company to move forward with additional testing before advancing to tape out.
The company's engineers were able to perform the Linux boot, execute a short user-mode program and shutdown the system on the fully functional FPGA emulation system. Not only does this successful test prove that the basic processor is stable, but interrupts, exceptions, timing, and system-mode transitions are, as well.
This is a key milestone, which will dramatically reduce risk, as booting and running large and complex pieces of software like Linux reliably on the Tachyum FPGA processor prototype shows that verification and hardware stability can be achieved. Designers are now looking at the debug and verification processes, and will be running hundreds of trillions of test cycles over the next few months, and running large scale user mode applications with compatibility testing to get the processor to production quality.
The Prodigy Universal Processor has progressed to a complete system prototype with integrated CPU, memory, PCI Express, networking and BMC management subsystems connected to the FPGA emulation system board. The fully functional Prodigy emulation system 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 in Q1 2022.
Commenting Dr. Radoslav Danilak, co-founder and CEO of Tachyum, said, “Achieving a successful Linux boot in 2 months after receiving the FPGA IO motherboard prototype is a huge milestone. As we turn to further debugging and testing, we look forward to being able to run larger user-mode applications on the Prodigy prototype next month.”
Tachyum's Prodigy processor can run HPC applications, convolutional AI, explainable AI, general AI, bio AI, and spiking neural networks, plus normal data centre workloads, on a single homogeneous processor platform, using existing standard programming models.
As the world’s first universal processor, Prodigy runs legacy x86, ARM and RISC-V binaries in addition to its native Prodigy code.
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), and is expected to deliver billions of dollars in annual savings to hyperscalers.
