The two enter a research contract worth $20 million / 15.35 million Euro

Dec 12, 2012 15:35 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA may be known mostly for its graphics chips and cards, but the past few years saw it become a prominent ARM processor maker as well. Now, it is moving on the embedded chip industry.

Though some may not know it, NVIDIA is behind some of the embedded processors used by Audi, BMW, Tesla and Lamborghini cars, as well as army tanks and planes like F-22 Raptor.

DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has awarded the Sunnyvale, California-based company a research contract for embedded processor technologies that could improve the ability of autonomous vehicles to collect and process data received through on-board sensor.

The contract covers a period of five years and expects to yield processors that are 75 times more energy efficient than the ones used today in surveillance and computer vision systems. That goes for both ground and air vehicles.

Project Osprey is the name of the $20 million initiative (15.35 million Euro). There should eventually be 7nm chips (today's best are 28nm) with 75 gigaflops per watt performance.