Tachyum

Tachyum is a semiconductor company established in 2016 with the goal of addressing the performance plateau in processor technology. The company was founded by a team of experienced industry veterans: Dr. Radoslav Danilak, Rodney Mullendore, Igor Shevlyakov, and Ken Wagner. Dr. Danilak, the CEO, is a serial entrepreneur with a background in processor and GPU architecture at NVIDIA, Toshiba, and other firms; he previously founded Skyera (acquired by Western Digital) and co-founded SandForce (acquired by LSI for $377M). This deep experience in processing systems and successful ventures forms the foundation of Tachyum's mission.

The company operates in the high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and data center markets, targeting hyperscale cloud providers, government agencies, and research institutions. Tachyum's business model is centered on the design and sale of its proprietary processor, aiming to provide a high-performance, low-power alternative to existing solutions from competitors like Intel and NVIDIA. The company is primarily venture-backed, having raised a $25 million Series A in 2019 and an undisclosed Series B round in 2021, with IPM Group as a lead investor.

Tachyum's flagship product is the Prodigy Universal Processor, engineered to unify the functions of a CPU, GPU, and TPU into a single, homogeneous architecture. This approach is intended to eliminate the need for costly, specialized hardware for different workloads. The Prodigy processor is a 64-bit chip built on a 5nm process, featuring up to 192 cores operating at up to 5.7 GHz. Key features include 16 channels of DDR5 memory support and 64 to 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes for connectivity. The company asserts that this design offers significant improvements in performance-per-watt, claiming it can reduce data center total cost of ownership (TCO) by a factor of four by consuming 10 times less power and costing three times less than conventional processors for equivalent performance. While Tachyum has announced milestones like booting Linux on its FPGA emulation prototype, the processor has faced multiple delays and, as of late 2023, has not yet reached mass production.

Keywords: universal processor, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, data center, semiconductor, CPU, GPU, TPU, Prodigy processor, Radoslav Danilak, hyperscale, cloud computing, processor architecture, energy efficiency, supercomputing, 5nm process, IPM Group, silicon design, FPGA emulation, nanometer, data analytics, machine learning, server hardware, low-power processor