The one chip startup building accelerators for something other than AI boasts performance up 10x that of modern GPUs using a fraction the power

Researchers and engineers working in particle physics, materials analysis, or drug discovery haven't exactly been spoiled for choice when it comes to chips capable of the highly precise double-precision calculations that these workloads depend. NextSilicon aims to change that with Maverick-2, a chip aimed not at AI but the high-performance computing (HPC) community.

This week, the chip startup offered the best look yet at how its dataflow accelerators — now deployed by several customers, including Sandia National labs — hold up in the wild, claiming up to a 10x advantage over leading GPUs.

In the High-Performance Conjugate Gradient benchmark popularized by the biannual Top500 HPCG leaderboard, a biannual ranking of supercomputers, NextSilicon claims to match "leading GPU" performance, while consuming half the power. In the test, the startup claims the chip achieved 600 gigaFLOPS at a mere 750 watts.

Meanwhile, in PageRank, NextSilicon says the chip achieves 10x higher graph analytics ...