Tachyum said this week it had completed the final build of its Prodigy FPGA emulation system, which is an important milestone for any design. In addition to that, the company said that it would delay the start of production for its universal 192-core Prodigy processsors from 2024 to 2025, but stressed that it still expects general availability of servers featuring its processors next year.
"Reaching this point of our development journey prior to tape-out and volume production of Prodigy processors next year is extremely gratifying," said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, founder and CEO of Tachyum.
This final hardware prototype is crucial for achieving over '10 quadrillion cycles in reliability tests,' a milestone Tachyum aims to hit before the Prodigy chips are taped out. These units will help ensure that the chips meet extreme reliability demands before entering full production.
Key updates in the final FPGA-based build include support for an increased core count beyond 128, following a previous upgrade to 192 cores last year. Additional enhancements have been made to support larger-capacity DIMMs, improve debugging processes, simplify communication through modified BMC-UEFI hardware, and replace board-to-board connectors for a better experience.
"Our commitment to delivering the world's smallest, fastest and greenest general-purpose chip has remained unwavering," Danilak added. "Ensuring this happens Day One of launch has been a priority for us and we are excited to be on the precipice of this industry-altering release."
The universal Prodigy processor promises to equally perform well with general purpose, graphics, and AI/ML workloads was initially set to launch in 2020, following a planned tape-out in 2019. However, its release has faced multiple delays, with the schedule pushed back from 2021 to 2022, then to 2023, and later to 2024. Earlier this year, Tachyum announced that it would begin mass production of the Prodigy processors in the second half of 2024, though this vague timeline could extend to December. Now, the company has apparently updated its plans again, indicating that mass production will instead start in 2025, which means that it will likely miss its target to start sampling of reference servers featuring the Prodigy processor in Q1 2025. However, it is still unclear from Tachyum's recent announcements whether the chip is on track to tape out in 2024.
Tachyum asserts that its processor can achieve up to 4.5 times the performance of the top x86 processors for cloud tasks, three times the performance of the leading GPUs for high-performance computing, and six times the performance for AI applications. However, despite these ambitious claims, no prototypes have been publicly demonstrated to confirm that the processor's architecture is both functional and capable of delivering these results.
