Rochester Scientists Get $3 Million Grant to Build a Better Chip
ROCHESTER, N.Y.
Four scientists at the University of Rochester have been awarded $3 million by the U.S. Department of Defense to build a faster computer chip.
David Albonesi leads the University of Rochester team that includes Sandhya Dwarkadas, Eby Friedman and Michael Scott.
“Today’s microprocessors are pretty inefficient when handling a variety of tasks,”
Albonesi says. “They’re designed to work well overall, but since they’re inflexible, they can’t work as well as they could for any particular program.”
Success could mean cell phones that last 10 times longer on batteries, blazing fast
notebook computers and a tidy cash payoff to the university for
licensing the technology.
The technique, still on the drawing board, calls for chips that electronically adapt their own circuits to the task at hand, shutting down unneeded parts and ramping up others.
The changes can be made millions of times per second, as the chip constantly adjusts to better handle video, sound, encryption or just to make a longer cell phone call.
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