Tachyum Inc.

Tachyum Inc. is a semiconductor company located in Santa Clara, CA, and Bratislava, Slovakia, which is designing the world’s first “Universal Processor”, a 64-core, low cost, ultra-high performance, low power processor chip. Prodigy, the company’s flagship product, is scheduled for high rate production in the first half of 2021, outperforms the fastest processors at 10x lower power (core vs. core) and also NVIDIA’s fastest GPU on neural net AI training and inference.

Tachyum was founded to address the processor performance plateau (processor clock speed hasn’t significantly improved in over 10 years), and the looming power crisis in cloud data centers, which currently consume ~2.5% of the world’s total electricity output (40% more than the entire UK), and which are doubling in capacity every 5 years. Tachyum’s mission is to deliver the next ubiquitous compute platform; one that will power cloud data center operations (both standard compute, and AI) as well as edge computing for IoT, as the preferred solution for the next 20 years.

Architect Behind Success Roadmap

Dr. Radoslav Danilak, the Co-founder and CEO of Tachyum, is an internationally recognized processor and data processing architect whose body of work includes contribution to Sony’s PlayStation 2 Processor, as well as NVIDIA’s Tesla and Fermi GPUs. He is also a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, having founded SandForce, where he designed the Flash memory controller which enabled cheap multi-level cell Flash to penetrate enterprise markets: Apple’s MacBook Air was cost-effectively enabled by Radoslav’s Flash memory controller.

After Sandforce’s acquisition by LSI for US$ 377 million in 2011, Radoslav founded Skyera, where he developed high-density flash storage systems (i.e. petabyte in a pizza box) used primarily by classified military & intelligence agencies. After Skyera was acquired by Western Digital / HGST in 2014, Dr. Radoslav turned his attention to the processor performance plateau and the data center power crisis. He founded Tachyum in 2016 to commercialize his disruptive new universal processor architecture.

Dr. Radoslav currently serves as a technology advisor to the Slovak government. He is a member of the IDC Technical Computing Advisory Panel, the Forbes Technology Council, and a contributor to TechTarget. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the TUKE Slovakia, where he taught compiler courses. Dr. Radoslav maintains an active posture in Silicon Valley, delivering invited presentations at major conferences and participating in technical and entrepreneurship organizations.

Unlocking Best-in Practice for Data Center and AI Workloads

Tachyum’s primary market is cloud computing (aka: hyperscale data centers) where two major challenges dwarf just about everything else: how to keep doubling data center capacity every 5 years, without a commensurate increase in electrical power requirements; and how to hyperscale data centers’ AI centers of excellence, capable of delivering cost-efficient Big-AI on demand. The company’s Prodigy processor solves both of these challenges. Since data centers are provisioned with enough servers to handle peak customer demand, in most data centers most of the time, more than 50% of servers are idle and powered down to save electricity costs. Since Prodigy delivers best-in-breed performance on both data center and AI workloads, idle servers can be powered up on-demand to provide AI computing resources to this explosive market (45% CAGR) – Capital Expenditure Free, since the servers are already bought and paid for. Every Prodigy-powered data center becomes, by definition, a low-cost Big-AI Center of Excellence. Tachyum believes the impact of its Prodigy Universal Processor will be profound across multiple large and growing markets.

Tachyum operates a wholly-owned subsidiary, Tachyum s.r.o in Bratislava Slovakia, where the final product will be produced. In this capacity, Tachyum in Bratislava will be a major contributor to the EU’s goal of “Digital Sovereignty” by providing an EU processor to EU and global markets.

On-Boarding Talent and Partnerships for Innovation

Dr. Radoslav’s architectural vision for the Prodigy processor, coupled with his ability to attract world-class talent to his development team are the biggest factors driving the unprecedented and innovative technology being developed at Tachyum.

Key partnerships with world-renowned business and technology leaders include:

Dr. Kurt Lauk joined Tachyum’s Advisory Board in 2019. He served on several management boards, including Daimler and Audi, and as a member of the EU Parliament. For 15 years, he was Chairman of the Economy Council (Wirtschaftsrat) and advised Angela Merkel in this capacity. Dr. Kurt is the Founder and President of Globe CP GmbH, a personally owned family office since 2000. He has extensive European business experience, primarily through his positions as Member of the Board of Management and Head of Worldwide Commercial Vehicles Division of Daimler Chrysler (1996-1999), as well as Deputy Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Audi AG (1989-1992).

In July 2018, Tachyum Inc. announced that Professor Steve Furber, the highly regarded original designer of the world’s leading embedded processor, the ARM microprocessor, has joined its Board of Advisors. In this capacity, Prof. Steve will help position the company’s Prodigy processor to achieve disruptive performance in Spiking Model neural simulations, as well as standard data center workloads.

In July 2017, Tachyum Inc. announced that Fred Weber well known for his ten years of leadership at AMD, where he served as Chief Technical Officer and Corporate Vice President, as well as Vice President of Design has joined its Board of Advisors. Fred led AMD to greater prominence in the industry and was named one of the 25 most influential CTOs by InfoWorld Magazine. Fred led the design of AMD's first 64-bit processor.

Addressing the Challenges

With operations in both Santa Clara, CA and Bratislava, Slovakia, Tachyum has had to work through a host of regulatory issues to ensure compliance, while maintaining sound corporate governance.

Dr. Radoslav said, “Another challenge is finding the highly qualified technical superstars to make organic Tachyum team members. While attracting potential candidates for engineering and management positions has not been an issue, sifting through dozens of people to find the one outstanding contributor for a given position, has required a significant commitment of time and resources.”

Remarkable Business Achievements

Dr. Radoslav has been recognized IT Person of the Year 2019 at IT GALA, the most prestigious annual event of the Slovak information technology and telecommunications communities.

Tachyum Inc. has been named one of the “50 Innovative Companies to Watch 2019” by The Silicon Review, the world’s most trusted online and print community for business and technology professionals.

Dr. Radoslav has been awarded the Pribina Cross, First Class by Slovakian President Andrej Kiska for innovations in data storage and processing at a state awards ceremony in Bratislava on January 8, 2019.

Tachyum Inc. was named a winner in the hardware sector category of the 2018 Red Herring Top 100 Global awards, which highlights the most exciting startups from Asia, Europe and the Americas. The award follows Tachyum’s recognition as a Red Herring Top 100 North America winner in June.

Dr. Radoslav has also been accepted into the Forbes Technology Council, an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.

Shaping the Future of Computing 

In the future, Tachyum sees itself as growing to over US$ 10 billion market-cap company, by producing the best and universal processor for major compute markets, and ushering in the era of low-cost data center computing (Prodigy delivers a 4x reduction in TCO: total annual cost of operation for hyperscale data centers), as well as the company that actually delivers low cost Big-AI on demand.

Prodigy will turn data centers into “Universal Computing Centers” – a major inflection point that will impact a broad spectrum of markets and customers.