Tachyum successfully tests BF16 on Prodigy FPGA hardware

Tachyum 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. “Sinc...