According to reports from foreign media Reuters, Tom's Hardware and SiliconANGLE, startups Efficient Computer Recently announced that its energy-efficient Fabric architecture Monza processor test chip has been returned, and received $16 million (currently about 115 million RMB) in seed round fundingFinancing.
▲ Monza test chip. Image source: Efficient Computer official
Efficient Computer claims that existing von Neumann architecture processors "waste 99% of energy": these processors are optimized for performance first, thus sacrificing energy efficiency.
at the same time,Current CPU Over-designed for compatibility with legacy software and possible workloads, ultimately paying the price in power consumption for a large number of memory-related instructions and parallelism.
Those specialized processors lack general programmability, which means their overall efficiency is limited by their slowest part, hindering improvements in energy efficiency.
Efficient Computer calls its Fabric a general-purpose "post-von Neumann" architecture that supports software programmability., offloads decisions about parallel processing to its dedicated compiler and uses spatial parallelism to eliminate most of the overhead.
This compiler is designed with reconfigurable CPU hardware to minimize energy consumption. In terms of compatibility, it supports multi-level intermediate representation (MLIR), allowing existing applications to run on Fabric architecture processors without modification, and supports all major embedded languages.
“Energy consumption impacts nearly every aspect of modern computing, from where devices are located to the capabilities they provide and the scale of deployment,” said Brandon Lucia, co-founder and CEO of Efficient Computer. “We are removing energy barriers to edge computing while giving developers the freedom and flexibility to quickly build devices and applications at scale. Efficient hardware and software will significantly reduce computing energy consumption, enabling entirely new categories of use cases.”
Efficient Computer's processor products are aimed at civil/industrial Internet of Things, infrastructure monitoring, wearable devices and defense. SiliconANGLE saidIt will deliver mass-produced chips to customers early next year.