
Efficient startup raises US$16 million for processor

Efficient Computer (Pittsburgh, Penn.) has raised US$16 million in seed funding to introduce a processor architecture that it claims is up to 100x more energy efficient than general-purpose CPUs on the market. The round was led by Eclipse VC.
Efficient’s energy efficiency comes from a coarse-grain reconfigurable dataflow architecture (CGRA) and is based on research conducted at Carnegie Mellon.
The company was founded by Professor Brandon Lucia (CEO), Graham Gobieski (CTO) and Nathan Beckmann (chief scientist) in January 2022. The architecture will enable a fully general-purpose programmable processor that supports mainstream, high-level programming languages, the company said.
The dataflow architecture of the Efficient processor is set to save energy across multiple domains, including machine learning-enabled extreme-edge machine vision, continuous audio intelligence, and versatile sensory and signals intelligence. It also enables developers to bring their own code, with support for mainstream embedded languages, to build rich intelligence applications that integrate AI/ML, signal processing, data analytics, and other general-purpose data processing computations.
The company appears to be focused on ultralow power computation at the edge and embedded applications.
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