Dr. Radoslav Danilak

Making the Impossible a Reality

“It was an honor to showcase Prodigy’s capabilities to Slovakian officials today, and demonstrate how our universal processor will provide an immediate impact to the world’s data centers by enabling efficient processing of increasingly needy applications,” said Danilak.

The numbers raised eyebrows and skeptics have questioned those claims, but the company’s CEO Radoslav Danilak isn’t perturbed. In an interview with HPCwire, he acknowledged delays and hopes to get working chips to partners by the end of the year, with customers getting it sometime next year.

When Tachyum unveiled the concept of its Prodigy Universal Processor at Hot Chips 18, it made quite a splash with a chip designed to run any code using a dynamic binary translator. It demonstrated high performance when executing both native and translated code.

Faster and more efficient than the competition: Tachyum promises a lot with the Prodigy CPU, and the CEO goes even further in this interview.

Almost since the birth of data centers, operators have single-mindedly concerned themselves with performance numbers, but right now, that focus is being split into other priorities like cost reduction and environmental responsibilities that were on the sidelines before.

The wait is finally over and the US-startup Tachyum has now launched its Prodigy universal processor which combines the functionality of a CPU, GPU and TPU in a single processor.

The 3nm Prodigy 2 design will add the CXL memory interface and PCIe 6.0 lanes from the same IP suppliers and increase the number of cores. The plan is for samples in 2H24 and this has already been funded as a key European project says Danilak.

FPGA specialist Tachyum has made an outlandish claim this week, by declaring its new Prodigy line of reprogrammable silicon as the “first universal processor.” With big performance claims to boot, the Prodigy FPGA is being positioned to target all manner of data center workloads, with video being a key use case.

Prodigy is significantly better than the best-performing processors currently available in hyperscale, HPC and AI markets.

The AI revolution is creating a tsunami of change that is sweeping through virtually every sector of the economy, both public and private, and it’s having a profound impact on our daily lives.

Tachyum-powered supercomputers are poised to address some of the world’s most important and challenging problems, including a wide array of global health challenges, as well as the ability to provide real-time language translation from any language to any other language, making the world a true global village.

Any way you slice it, the explosive growth in AI technology means that consumers, corporations and government agencies will soon be able to exploit highly advanced AI systems in order to create life experiences that we can only dream of today. Human brain-scale computing is now looming on the horizon, and it could change your life more than electricity.

These startups are taking on semiconductor heavyweights like Intel and Nvidia with new kinds of silicon solutions for compute, storage and networking, many of which are headed for the data center.

Prodigy’s intense computing muscle can help AI use cases in particular. Convolutional neural networks, deep learning AI, symbolic AI, general AI, and bio AI are the disciplines that have emerged in recent years, each with its own set of algorithms and computing criteria.

Human brain modeling, meanwhile, is in high demand by R&D ventures due to its promise of extracting information from large data sets. The Tachyum Universal Processor Platform is suitable for projects like the real-time Human Brain Project, which needs more than 1019 Flops (10,000,000,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second – 10 exaflops), as well as supplying computing resources for science and engineering solutions that today’s systems cannot offer.

Dr. Rado Danilak is talking about Tachyum and its world first universal processor Prodigy, which was designed to replace the majority of existing chips provisioned in hyperscale (cloud) data centers, offering significant improvements in performance, energy consumption, server utilization and space requirements.

Dr. Danilak explained the dark side of digitalization and why we need powerful and efficient systems if we want the digitalization evolution to continue. He answered questions about Prodigy development progress and also personal questions what he likes to do in his spare time.