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Nvidia Wins $20M In DARPA Money To Work On Hyper-Efficient Chips

Posted by timothy on from the just-tickle-the-electrons dept.

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."

3 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't this economic without DARPA funding? by iceco2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:did i misread something ? by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We passed 1e+07 operations per kWh in 1965.
    We passed 1e+08 operations per kWh in 1971.
    We passed 1e+09 operations per kWh in 1976.
    We passed 1e+10 operations per kWh in 1981.
    We passed 1e+11 operations per kWh in 1987.
    We passed 1e+12 operations per kWh in 1992.
    We passed 1e+13 operations per kWh in 1997.
    We passed 1e+14 operations per kWh in 2001.
    We passed 1e+15 operations per kWh in 2008.

    citation and graph

    Energy efficiency consistently doubles approximately every 1.6 years, so if we are at ~16 glops/watt right now, then we will blow past DARPA's target early in 2016... just a little over 3 years from now.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  3. Money matters, but ... by DavidClarkeHR · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.