Tachyum's Prodigy emulator achieves first boot, runs Linux and says 'hello, world' Tachyum has announced a milestone on the road to finally launching its much-vaunted high-performance "universal processor," Prodigy, with a first-boot into Linux - but its FPGA prototype is still a long way away from proving the company's bold claims. Founded in 2017 by a team made up of Skyera and SandForce co-founder Dr …
"'Universal processor' startup still no nearer to proving bold claims of tenfold performance gain over Chipzilla, AMD"
I'm not sure it matters. If it is open and doesn't do creepy things like the others, it should win out slowly in the end (unless it gets bought by Intel or AMD of course which is unfortunately too likely).
Or it doesn't exist at all, except to con money out of investors.
If they're really about to release the FPGA emulator to customers, then at least someone will get a look at what the instruction set looks like, and how novel it really is.
Have they patented anything? Then the patents will be published.
On the contrary, quantum computing only exists because - first - a diverse bunch of physicist thought it would be cool thing to achieve, and although they might need money to investigate it, they weren't asking "investors".
It might now be that - subsequently - a range of people use "quantum computing" to "con money out of investors", but this is not why quantum computing exists (whether in its current limited state, or in general).
Maybe I'm just too cynical, but a tenfold performance gain over Intel and AMD is a ridiculous claim unless they are trying to claim tenfold performance based on power consumption in which case I'd suspect that this outfit would claim their metric against the most power hungry Intel and AMD chips and not against their mobile offerings.
Not that another processor platform and competition is a bad thing, but this one comes across like yet another charlatan.
"Anamartic" was wafer scale integration: external software programmed faulty circuits to be bypassed.
I've got a copy of The Catt Concept: The New Industrial Darwinism on my bookshelf, it must be a very long time since I bought/read it, though.
An ex-housemate worked on AMULET. Apparently Steve was really quite peeved that the first silicon had more than zero bugs in it, as everything he'd previously designed had come back bug-free first try. I mean, the design was only an order of magnitude bigger than anything asynchronous that anyone else had ever attempted...
The spiritual descendant is really Furber's Spiking Neural Network (Spinnaker) work - neuron simulation using only kilowatts of power, rather than megawatts. Worth the look.
Personally, I'm still waiting for the previous unbelievable breakthrough in CPUs to be released - The Atom Chip
I have in my box of bits an Inmos T800 Transputer board. They were supposed to revolutionise everything. The software I was working on, well we dropped support when you needed 30 of the buggers (at £1,000 a throw) to get the same performance as a 90MHz PII.
The Intel/AMD architecture may be horribly complicated and burdened by backward-compatibility, but so long as megabucks keep getting thrown at it, it will be around for a while.
More like the goals of project Tangerine in 1980s. Apple, IBM and others. Add in Itanic to TransMeta reference and one can see how how goals have reduced until this came along. Cant see how it can claim speed increase. IMHO, the various ARM derivatives look a more likely bet for at least partial success. If they demonstrate lower leccy use, one may trully become dominant.
Tachyum is approaching this development in a highly professional manner. They're verifying the Prodigy design judiciously because failure is not an option. Keep in mind Tachyum will share a similar advanced TSMC technology as the big boys. The way I see it, by combining CPU, GPU and TPU, the Prodigy will deliver a broad range of processing capability in combination with broad software compatibility, and at a much lower price than the big boys in the cloud. I have no connection with this company, but I'm bullish in terms of this venture!
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