Tachyum announced that its Prodigy software distribution, a completely integrated software stack and package, is now available to early adopters and customers as a pre-installed image as part of the beta phase of testing.
Applications included in the beta version of the distribution package have been tested to work straight out of the box so that customers and partners can immediately begin using the Prodigy reference design. Additionally, users can effortlessly restore to the original image in case any issues arise during the beta testing phase.
As part of the beta release, Tachyum upgraded all software and tested 57b addressing with applications on the Prodigy FPGA emulation system. The company also began performance optimization, moving to 64KB page size as the default of its software distribution. The 4KB pages that Intel copied from IBM 370 in 1971 are outdated with 4KB support now viewed as legacy. Because optimization towards 16KB storage block size is where modern high-capacity, cost-efficient SSD storage is headed, Tachyum will focus on SSD Indirection Unit (IU) 16KB with 4KB pages only serving as a backup solution for those who have a special need.
Additional advancements to the beta release include:
- GCC was updated to the most recent version that supports BFloat16 data type.
- 4KB 48b VA was tested to indicate whether issues were more likely in hardware vs. software but now with cleanly running 57b VA on Prodigy FPGA emulation system, Tachyum switched to 57b VA and fixed bugs in software.
- Tachyum is now switching to 64KB pages 55b VA in the QEMU software emulator as application software in these modes is less frequently tested. After testing in QEMU, Tachyum will test it on the FPGA prototype of its Prodigy.
- Tachyum will achieve the same testing coverage on 64KB pages as with 4KB pages with 48b VA.
This latest progression in the Prodigy software distribution closely follows a series of progressive achievements as part of Tachyum’s advancement to production-ready status. These achievements include adding support for performance optimization using counters and instruction profiling, hardware debugging capabilities and a watchdog timer to help detect and recovery from device or system malfunctions.
Tachyum previously advanced the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) to beta and has added RAID 1 capabilities and UEFI manual; the FreeBSD operating system can now be compiled using LLVM; and Linux kernel in the beta release will have mTHP support.
“Hardware and software must be able to work in unison to produce the greatest results possible,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, founder and CEO of Tachyum. “With the successes we have had in advancing the hardware aspect of the Prodigy Universal Processor Chip, moving our software distribution package to beta is a tremendous step in achieving our goals of revolutionizing the data center. We are thankful to those partners and customers that have helped us achieve beta status and are excited to see what they can do with this latest, upgraded version of our software.”
As a Universal Processor offering industry-leading performance for all workloads, Prodigy-powered data center servers can seamlessly and dynamically switch between computational domains (such as AI/ML, HPC, and cloud) with a single homogeneous architecture. By eliminating the need for expensive dedicated AI hardware and dramatically increasing server utilization, Prodigy reduces CAPEX and OPEX significantly while delivering unprecedented data center performance, power, and economics. Prodigy integrates 192 high-performance custom-designed 64-bit compute cores, to deliver up to 4.5x the performance of the highest-performing x86 processors for cloud workloads, up to 3x that of the highest performing GPU for HPC, and 6x for AI applications.
SOURCE: Businesswire