But while Tachyum's specifications for its Prodigy universal processor look overwhelming, you have to keep in mind that the devices won't launch until the end of the decade. Even with that in mind, the performance promises of Tachyum, compared to non-existent hardware, look outright odd.
Tachyum used to promise that its Prodigy delivered 'orders of magnitude higher AI performance, 3x the performance of the best x86 processors, and 6x HPC performance of the fastest GPGPU, but without providing any quantitative data.'
The company's tune changed in the latest press release, as it described Prodigy as delivering as much as five times the integer throughput, up to 16 times the AI performance, 8X the memory bandwidth, four times the inter-chip and I/O bandwidth, four times greater multi-socket scaling with support for 16 sockets, and roughly double the power efficiency, again without providing any actual numbers. The only exception is perhaps the memory bandwidth claim (3.38 TB/s), but it is not eight times higher compared to AMD's EPYC 9005 -series CPUs.
Perhaps addressing concerns about its consistent lack of numbers, Tachyum revealed that its 2nm Prodigy would deliver over '1,000 PFLOPS on inference' and compared this number to Nvidia's Rubin GPU , which is claimed to deliver 50 NVFP4 PFLOPS, suggesting that its processor deals with a similar data format (e.g., FP4, MXFP4, or a proprietary 4-bit format).
However, the claim may contradict common sense, as achieving 20 times higher performance than the Rubin GPU while offering 3.8 times lower memory bandwidth is extremely difficult for bandwidth-bound AI inference workloads. Meanwhile, the 20 times higher performance figure seems to serve as the basis for a claim that a rack-scale Prodigy-based solution will be 21.3 times faster than Nvidia's NVL576, which will feature 144 Rubin Ultra GPU packages.
Perhaps the only useful number revealed by Tachyum this week was '400 FP64 TFLOPS for HPC' performance claim for its top-of-the-range 1,024-core Prodigy Ultimate processor. If true, then the processor is indeed 10 times faster than Nvidia's Blackwell B200 (40 FP64 TFLOPS) at a 400W higher power, and five times faster than AMD's Instinct MI355X (78.6 FP64 TFLOPS), but since we do not know which unit generated that result and how it was achieved, we cannot really make this comparison. In fact, given Tachyum's tendency to create proprietary metrics (like 'TAI PFLOPS'), the '400 DP TFLOPS' figure may not follow standard FLOP accounting (e.g., if it uses DP-equivalent precision).
This week's announcement from Tachyum covers some performance aspects of the Prodigy universal processor, reveals major design changes (multi-chiplet design, 2nm node), discloses alterations of already announced specifications (more cores per chiplet, fewer memory channels per chiplet, PCIe 7.0 support, etc.), and indicates that the company plans to build the processor using a 2nm-class fabrication technology, presumably at TSMC. This is all in a bid to draw a positive picture about the processor. However, all these details point to another major delay of Tachyum's Prodigy.
Around a year ago, Tachyum planned to tape out its 192-core Prodigy implemented on a 5nm-class fabrication technology in 2025 . This suggests that the silicon at least existed as an HDL code (RTL complete); its verification and simulation must have been underway or mostly done, so the company only had to synthesize the physical design and then send its GDSII file to its production partner to create photomasks and build the first wafer.
However, now that Tachyum plans to enhance the design and move from a FinFET-based 5nm-class process technology to a gate-all-around transistor-based 2nm-class fabrication node, it has to enhance its high-level design and then go back to the RTL design phase of the chip, as almost all physical constraints of the chip change with the transistor type.
Since everything changes for Prodigy with the redesign and adoption of the 2nm GAA technology, Tachyum will now have to completely rework its RTL from scratch, which will take well over a year (more likely 1.5 years, we're being optimistic), considering that it has a team of between 51 and 200 employees . Full-chip verification and validation (pre-layout) will likely take another 12 to 18 months, given that this is a complex chiplet implemented on a state-of-the-art fabrication technology.
After the worst functional bugs are shaken out, Tachyum's team may start synthesizing physical design, which will partly overlap with verification and validation, but will still take well over 18 months. After that, the company may proceed to tape out, which will take another half of a year, followed by first-silicon bring-up and post-silicon validation, taking around a year if the first chip works fine (if something needs a respin, add another 18 months). By the time these steps are complete, Prodigy will be ready for mass production. However, both the silicon and platform will take at the very least another six months to ramp.
As a result, Tachyum will be exceedingly lucky if it gets its Prodigy silicon ready to ship in 60 months from now if it starts work today, which means late 2029 in the very best-case scenario, with actual products shipping by 2030. A more realistic scenario is getting the silicon done in around five years (by late 2030), and if the silicon needs a respin, everything gets delayed to 2031 – 2032.
But time may not be Tachyum's biggest problem: it may run out of money well before it gets Prodigy silicon from the fab, as designing a 2nm GAA-based chip from RTL to mass production will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, north of $300 million, depending on the complexity of the chip. Perhaps the company can still pull the Prodigy project off with massive outsourcing, but even then, will the processor be competitive with solutions on the market in circa 2030? Furthermore, if Tachyum was willing to outsource Prodigy design earlier, why hasn't it done so already?
Tachyum's upgraded new specifications of its Prodigy universal processor make it look like a formidable competitor in the CPU world. However, these new specifications imply that Tachyum must restart much of the design and verification work, pushing the project back by at least four to five years. Given the company's limited resources, history of missed timelines, and the immense cost of designing a cutting-edge 2nm GAA chip, Prodigy may struggle to remain competitive by the time it could realistically ship.
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Anton Shilov Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/after-six-years-of-promises-and-no-shipping-silicon-tachyum-revises-prodigy-processor-specs-to-1-024-cores-with-1-600w-of-power-consumption-likely-another-5-year-delay-company-claims-its-chip-is-20-times-faster-than-nvidias-rubin-nvl576-rack#main
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