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Nvidia Wins $20M In DARPA Money To Work On Hyper-Efficient Chips
coondoggie writes "Nvidia said this week it got a contract worth up to $20 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop chips for sensor systems that could boost power output from today's 1 GFLOPS/watt to 75 GFLOPS/watt."
If used as space heaters, that is.
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But you will need their proprietary driver.
It seems to me a x75 increase in power efficiency should be worth to nVidia (or any competitor) much more than $20M, why does DARPA need to fund this, this seems exactly like the kind of work which doesn't need DARPA money. DARAPA should spend money where it is not clearly economic for others to do so.
DARPA money is tax payer money.
Why GFLOPS/watt? that is (operations/second)/(Joules/second). why not just operations/joule?
the latest gpus are laready 15-18 GFLOPS/watt already. *confused*
As things usually do, the results of this research will eventually trickle down to desktops, laptops and mobile devices, and will result in either lesser power consumption or the same power consumption but in higher performance -- either way it's a plus. I just wish the contract could've been given to someone other than NVIDIA as it would be nice if the results of the research were released completely for free to the public instead of being patented up the wazoo, but alas, NVIDIA has so much experience in these things that it just makes sense to slap them with it if you expect results.
So of course the Federal government needs to blow $20 million of taxpayer money, irregardless of its fiscal condition.
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"chips for sensor systems"
Wonder what they mean by "sensor systems".
It seems to me a x75 increase in power efficiency should be worth to nVidia (or any competitor) much more than $20M, why does DARPA need to fund this, this seems exactly like the kind of work which doesn't need DARPA money. DARAPA should spend money where it is not clearly economic for others to do so.
You were under the assumption that we live in a purely capitalistic society? My mistake. Even in countries that are into extreme capitalism shift back to subsidies and support when it comes to certain things.
...
Though, usually those things involve essential services like fire-fighters, road maintenance, and policing
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
So of course the Federal government needs to blow $20 million of taxpayer money, irregardless of its fiscal condition.
I prefer it was spent on computing, rather than explosions.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
In the spirit of the flame war you may have begun, you do know that AMD generally has faster chips?
I don't know that. I haven't seen any extensive research on such a topic and I do not have the time or money to come to such conclusion myself. Also, I am not taking any stance whatsoever on which one of the two would've been better suited for the task at hand, I'll leave waging such silly flame wars to you.
..and 20 mil is enough to develop that??? 75x the capability?
I'm no genius in development or marketing, but if that could have been done, it would have already.
I don't see in TFA where it says how long they have to complete this project. So that makes one wonder if they'll (based on Moore's Law) have it out one week earlier than all competitors with that small lump of change.
They also don't have CUDA. Some people in my field have considered doing high performance computing on Radeons and generally stick with the thing that's easier to code for.
re: I prefer it was spent on computing, rather than explosions.
.
Don't forget that they can use the improved computational power and that improved computational power efficiency to simulate and design better explosions! But look at how much innovation comes about from war and war/defense funding. (It's not hard to search for it). Heck, even canned food had its research and development funded by Napoleon to help the French military.
And it cuts both ways: any innovation can be put to use in the aid of defense and in the aid of war. Many technologies and concepts created for the war and defense industry also have many civilian and non-military applications.
As an avid nVidia fan, I do hope they will share their findings with AMD(and Intel if applicable) to prevent anti-trust monopolies and to encourage even more innovation.
AMD generally has faster chips
Perhaps, but at what cost?
"What are you doing here, Elijah?"
Current NVIDIA K20X compute card produces 5.575 Gflops double precision/Watt:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6446/nvidia-launches-tesla-k20-k20x-gk110-arrives-at-last
Note that these cards are slightly different than consumer graphics cards. They have more double-precision pipelines because scientific computing cares more about that kind of math. They are also much more expensive than consumer cards. The underlying chip design is similar to the 600-series graphics cards. You can think of it as a modified version optimized for math, since the 600 series came out first, and is being produced in higher volume.
My theory is that by putting investment capital in to the tech, they have a "mob-like" hand in the technology. Yes, it doesn't seem like a good investment of DARPA's money now, but the favor WILL be repaid by nVidia at some point, probably to a tune of much greater than $20 million. GPU's have incredible potential for processing power even in current day, and DARPA is one of the government divisions that I would expect might need such power for various project(s).
There aren't (and never will be) enough bitcoins.