Perhaps in no other technology has there been so many decades of large year-over-year improvements as in computing. It is estimated that a third of all productivity increases in the U.S. since 1974 have come from information technology,a,4 making it one of the largest contributors to national prosperity. The rise of computers is due to technical successes, but also to the economics forces that financed them. Bresnahan and Trajtenberg3 coined the term general purpose technology (GPT) for products, like computers, that have broad technical applicability and where product improvement and market growth could fuel each other for many decades. But, they also predicted that GPTs could run into challenges at the end of their life cycle: as progress slows, other technologies can displace the GPT in particular niches and undermine this economically reinforcing cycle. We are observing such a transition today as improvements in central processing units (CPUs) slow, and so applications move to specialized processors, for example, graphics processing units (GPUs), which can do fewer things than traditional universal processors, but perform those functions better. Many high profile applications are already following this trend, including deep learning (a form of machine learning) and Bitcoin mining. With this background, we can now be more precise about our thesis: "The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology." We do not mean that computers, taken together, will lose technical abilities and thus'forget' how to do some calculations.

Tachyum Inc. announced that it has reached another milestone in meeting its goal of volume production of the Prodigy Universal Processor in 2021 by achieving 96 percent of silicon designed and layout completed, with only a stable netlist layout to go before the final netlist and tape out. The company has been making steady progress in its march toward Prodigy's product release next year. While advancing the state of Prodigy's design to 96 percent completion, Tachyum further confirmed in verification that Prodigy has correctly executed instructions directly from DDR5 memory through coherent mesh with the Prodigy core producing correct results. The company also confirmed that this latest Prodigy post-layout netlist maintains clock speed targets with no die size growth from its previous netlist layout milestone. With Prodigy's first package pin-out done, cache miss handling over coherent interconnect has been verified, as have the majority of instructions.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 4, 2020 – Tachyum Inc. announced that its Prodigy Universal Processor has successfully completed software emulation testing across x86, ARM and RISC-V binary environments. This important milestone demonstrates that Prodigy will enable customers to run their legacy applications transparently at launch with better performance than any contemporary or future ARM or RISC-V processors. Coupled with hyperscale data center workhorse programs such as Hadoop, Apache and more, which Tachyum is recompiling to Prodigy native code, this capability will ensure that Prodigy customers can run a broad spectrum of applications, right out of the box. Tachyum customers consistently indicate that they would run 100% native applications within 9-18 months of transitioning to the Tachyum platform to exceed performance of the fastest Xeon processor. The emulation is to smoothly transition to native software for Tachyum Prodigy.