Tachyum, a start-up based in San Jose, California with offices in Slovakia, unveiled its new processor family – codenamed “Prodigy” – that combines the advantages of CPUs with GP-GPUs, and specialized AI chips in a single universal processor platform. The company says its processor architecture attains ten times the processing power per watt compared to conventional designs.
A key innovation of the design is the ability to connect very fast transistor with very slow wires, but technical details on the device physics have not yet been disclosed.
The universal processor promises programming ease comparable to a CPU with performance and efficiency comparable to GP-GPU. It is designed to handle hyperscale workloads, AI, HPC, and other demanding applications
Tachyum claims its Prodigy universal processor will enable a super-computational system for real-time full capacity human brain neural network simulation by 2020. One target application would be the real-time Human Brain Project, where there’s a need for more than 1019 Flops (10,000,000,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second – 10 exaflop).
“Rather than build separate infrastructures for AI, HPC and conventional compute, the Prodigy chip will deliver all within one unified simplified environment, so for example AI or HPC algorithms can run while a machine is otherwise idle or underutilized,” said Tachyum CEO Dr. Radoslav ‘Rado’ Danilak. “Instead of supercomputers with a price tag in the hundreds of millions, Tachyum will make it possible to empower hyperscale datacenters to produce more work in a radically more efficient and powerful format, at a lower cost.”
“Despite efficiency gains from virtualization, cloud computing, and parallelism, there are still critical problems with datacenter resource utilization particularly at a size and scale of hundreds of thousands of servers,” said Christos Kozyrakis, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford, who leads the university’s Multiscale Architecture & Systems Team (MAST), a research group for cloud computing, energy-efficient hardware, and operating systems. “Tachyum’s breakthrough processor architecture will deliver unprecedented performance and productivity.” Kozyrakis is a corporate advisor to Tachyum.
- Tachyum is headed by Dr. Radoslav ‘Rado’ Danilak, who previously was founder and CEO of Skyera, a supplier of ultra-dense solid-state storage systems, acquired by WD in 2014. He also was cofounder and CTO of SandForce, which was acquired by LSI in 2011 for $377M. Its cofounders include Rodney Mullendore (previously Sandforce, Nishan Systems, Sandia National Labs); Igor Shevlyakov (previously Skyera); Ken Wagner (previously Wave Computing, Silicon Analystics and Theseus Logic).
- Tachyum is funded by IPM Growth, the venture capital division of InfraPartners Management LLP.
