This announcement represents a critical piece of the company’s test strategy ensuring that Tachyum’s Prodigy hardware will be ready for production later this year.
Replacing legacy BIOS, UEFI is a next-generation interface between operating systems and platform firmware and was developed to allow support for new technologies during the boot process before the OS loads. Supported bootloaders for Prodigy include Systemd-Boot and GRUB2.
UEFI requires non-cacheable access that has been debugged. As part of its recent testing, Tachyum completed the boot flow from UEFI firmware to Linux OS. By starting execution of the Prodigy processor in non-cacheable mode, UEFI running on the actual Prodigy design proves readiness of components integrated into the software stack.
Together with Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), Tachyum now has core pieces for motherboard and system manufacturers ready and customers will have the opportunity to access Prodigy’s source code so that they can create their own UEFI.
“Every effort is being made to ensure that Prodigy will run optimally upon its release later this year, taking each step of the testing process one by one to validate its readiness,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, founder and CEO of Tachyum. “By achieving the completion of our UEFI development and making it readily available to developers, we are advancing our expectations that Prodigy will deliver the performance, cost and power consumption benefits needed to tackle the most-demanding data centre operations of hyperscale, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads.”
Prodigy is the world’s first Universal Processor and delivers, what the company describes as, a revolutionary new architecture that will unify the functionality of CPU, GPGPU, and TPU into a single monolithic device, and dynamically reallocates server resources to maximise utilisation without expensive and power-hungry accelerators.
Prodigy is capable of delivering improved data centre performance, power, and economics, reducing CAPEX and OPEX significantly.
Because of its utility for both high-performance and line-of-business applications, Prodigy-powered data centres servers will be able to seamlessly and dynamically switch between workloads, eliminating the need for expensive dedicated AI hardware and dramatically increasing server utilization.
According to Tachyum, its Prodigy device delivers performance up to 4x that of the highest performing x86 processors (for cloud workloads) and up to 3x that of the highest performing GPU for HPC and 6x for AI applications.
