NVidia wins $US20 million DARPA grant to supercharge low-power computing

NVidia has won a $US20 million grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in order to boost the processing capabilities of low-power chips. According to Network World, current chips are capable of around 1 GigaFLOPS per watt, meaning they can process 1 billion floating point operations per second for each watt of […]

Andrew Sadauskas 20 December, 2012

NVidia has won a $US20 million grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in order to boost the processing capabilities of low-power chips.

According to Network World, current chips are capable of around 1 GigaFLOPS per watt, meaning they can process 1 billion floating point operations per second for each watt of power used.

Codenamed the Power Efficiency Revolution For Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT) program, the research aims to increase that processing power to 75 GigaFLOPS per watt.

The research will mean that future chips will either be able to process 75 times the number of instructions per second using the same amount of electricity as today’s chips, or alternatively the chips will process the same number of instructions with a fraction of the power.