NVIDIA awarded $20M contract by DARPA

NVIDIA has been awarded a contract worth up to $20M from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to research embedded processor technologies that could lead to dramatic improvements in the ability of autonomous vehicles to collect and process data from on-board sensors. DARPA is the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm. The five-year contract, awarded under DARPA's Power Efficiency Revolution For Embedded Computing Technologies, or PERFECT, program, will fund research for processors that are 75-times more energy efficient than current embedded solutions. The goal is to enable surveillance and computer vision systems in ground and airborne vehicles to collect and analyze vastly more data than can be processed today in real time.