Tachyum has confirmed that it will begin mass production of its Prodigy Universal Processor later this year, the product that combines the functionality of a CPU, GPU and TPU in a single unit and threatens to revolutionize the AI market.
The 192-core, 5nm processor delivers 4.5 times the performance of best processors for cloud workloads, it can be up to three times better than GPUs for high-performance computing (HPC) and can be six times more effective than GPUs for AI applications.
The company first time they made fun its universal processing component in 2022 and with it promised to transform hyperscale data centers into universal computing centers that can pave the way for the computing power and efficiency needed to handle AI workloads. Then, in December 2023, he posted a video showing that he could emulate x86 applications, despite not incorporating any hardware into his architecture.
Can the all-in-one processor usurp Nvidia?
“The successes we were able to achieve as we fine-tuned our product roadmap have led us into a 2024 full of anticipation as we move toward volume production of Prodigy and fulfilling a multi-billion dollar sales pipeline,” said Dr. Radoslav. Danilak, CEO and founder of Tachyum. .
“We look forward to fulfilling our commitment to transform ordinary data centers into universal computing centers in the near future.”
Because the component incorporates functionality for multiple types of workloads, it can dynamically switch between computational domains, while seemingly eliminating the need for expensive hardware dedicated to AI workloads.
All of this follows from the company's press release, which summarized the company's achievements during 2023 and outlined the company's strategy for the coming years.
Among its outlandish claims, the company claimed that just one of its $23,000 processors could match the AI training performance of a highly sophisticated range of 52 Nvidia H200 GPUs, currently among the best GPUs out there. Storing that many GPUs alongside seven Supermicro GPU servers would cost $2,349,028, the company stated, compared to a single Prodigy Pocket system with 2TB DDR5 DRAM.
But that's just the beginning, with Tachyum scheduling Prodigy 2, a 3nm processor that uses PCIe 6.0 and CXL, along with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) 3 RAM, for release in 2026, according to Tom Hardware.
It remains to be seen if the finished product lives up to the company's claims, but Tachyum has received a large purchase order to build a large-scale system. The company has also published a series of technical documents so that developers know what to expect when the processor becomes available.
