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."
Re:Isn't this economic without DARPA funding? (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe DARPA also wants the thing to withstand radiation. Maybe they want it to have so little computational power that it would not sell in the market. Maybe they want every component to have been made in the US which the market won't care about. Maybe they have other restrictions. You don't know.
NVIDIA is worth $7.87 billion (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:did i misread something ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [economist.com]
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.