Tachyum Successfully Runs UEFI on Prodigy FPGA

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 31, 2023 – Tachyum today announced that it has successfully demonstrated Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) running on the Prodigy Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware emulation system, representing a critical piece of the company’s test strategy and ensuring that Tachyum’s Prodigy hardware is maturing on pace for production later this year.

Replacing legacy BIOS, UEFI is a next-generation interface between operating systems and platform firmware. UEFI was developed to allow support for new technologies during the boot process before the OS loads. Supported bootloaders for Prodigy include Systemd-Boot and GRUB2.

UEFI requires non-cacheable access that has been debugged. As part of its recent testing, Tachyum successfully completed the boot flow from UEFI firmware to Linux OS. By starting execution of the Prodigy processor in non-cacheable mode, UEFI running on the actual Prodigy design proves readiness of components integrated into the software stack.

Together with Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), Tachyum now has core pieces for motherboard and system manufacturers at the ready. Customers will have the opportunity to access Prodigy’s source code so that they can create their own UEFI. This advancement in status indicates that Tachyum’s Prodigy hardware is rapidly maturing for release.

“Every effort is being made to ensure that Prodigy will run optimally upon its release later this year, taking each step of the testing process one by one to validate its readiness,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, founder and CEO of Tachyum. “By achieving the completion of our UEFI development and making it readily available to developers, we are advancing our expectations that Prodigy will deliver the performance, cost and power consumption benefits needed to tackle the most-demanding data center operations of hyperscale, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads.”

Prodigy, the world’s first Universal Processor, delivers a revolutionary new architecture that unifies the functionality of CPU, GPGPU, and TPU into a single monolithic device, and dynamically reallocates server resources to maximize utilization without expensive and power-hungry accelerators. Tachyum has provided ideal server, cabinet, networking, and storage designs to help meet the high demands of cloud and HPC/AI workloads with Prodigy.

Prodigy delivers unprecedented data center performance, power, and economics, reducing CAPEX and OPEX significantly. Because of its utility for both high-performance and line-of-business applications, Prodigy-powered data center servers can seamlessly and dynamically switch between workloads, eliminating the need for expensive dedicated AI hardware and dramatically increasing server utilization. Tachyum’s Prodigy delivers performance up to 4x that of the highest performing x86 processors (for cloud workloads) and up to 3x that of the highest performing GPU for HPC and 6x for AI applications.

A video demonstrating UEFI with an option for an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)-stub extension is available below. With this option, it’s possible to build the Linux kernel as a PE/COFF or portable executable common object file format image and run it directly from the UEFI shell as a standard EFI executable binary.