Nvidia Wins $20M In DARPA Money To Work On Hyper-Efficient Chips 72
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."
Isn't this economic without DARPA funding? (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.
Money matters, but ... (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.
Re:did i misread something ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Out of curiosity (and I ask because I genuinely don't know), how many flops/watt do modern smartphones do? What about the GPU coprocessors in them?
Modern GPU's are great, but they're not even optimized that strongly for power consumption.