Tachyum Successfully Tests BF16 on Prodigy FPGA Hardware

Tachyum^® today announced that BF16 has been successfully tested and verified operational on its Prodigy^® FPGA, ensuring increased throughput for users’ high-performance processing needs.

BF16, or bfloat16, is a shortened floating point data type based on the IEEE 32-bit single-precision floating point data type (f32). It is used to accelerate machine learning by reducing storage requirements and increasing the calculation speed of ML algorithms. Tachyum provided support for BF16 for use with GCC 13.2 (GNU Compiler Collection) and tested the software integration of BF16. Tachyum supports the same floating-point BF16 operations as IEEE FP32 and FP64 in hardware.

Tachyum’s Prodigy was designed to handle matrix and vector processing from the ground up rather than as an afterthought. Among Prodigy’s vector and matrix features are support for a range of data types (FP64, FP32, TF32, BF16, Int8, FP8, FP4 and TAI); 2x1024-bit vector units per core; AI sparsity and super-sparsity support; and no penalty for misaligned vector loads or stores when crossing cache lines. This built-in support offers high performance for AI training and inference workloads, increases performance and reduces memory utilization.

"Two months ago, Tachyum successfully integrated the BF16 datatype into Prodigy’s GCC compiler and software distribution," said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, founder and CEO of Tachyum. “Since there is no standard application test, we developed an AI inference BF16 test application that has since been vetted for use on the Prodigy FPGA. The BF16 test application on FPGA shows that it performs optimally as part of Tachyum AI’s tensor matrix operations.”

The BF16 matrix tensor operations will be showcased in Prodigy FPGA HW prototype next month, followed by FP8, FP4 and low-precision data types.

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.

A video demonstration of the BF16 test application on Prodigy FPGA is available to view at https://youtu.be/Dp7x6y-8nzY.

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About Tachyum

Tachyum is transforming the economics of AI, HPC, public and private cloud workloads with Prodigy, the world’s first Universal Processor. Prodigy unifies the functionality of a CPU, a GPU, and a TPU in a single processor to deliver industry-leading performance, cost and power efficiency for both specialty and general-purpose computing. As global data center emissions continue to contribute to a changing climate, with projections of their consuming 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030, the ultra-low power Prodigy is positioned to help balance the world’s appetite for computing at a lower environmental cost. Tachyum received a major purchase order from a US company to build a large-scale system that can deliver more than 50 exaflops performance, which will exponentially exceed the computational capabilities of the fastest inference or generative AI supercomputers available anywhere in the world today. When complete in 2026, the Prodigy-powered system will deliver a 25x multiplier vs. the world’s fastest conventional supercomputer – built just this year – and will achieve AI capabilities 25,000x larger than models for ChatGPT4. Tachyum has offices in the United States and Slovakia. For more information, visit https://www.tachyum.com/.

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