A disruptive approach is followed through research into unconventional architectures that dramatically improve energy efficiency and at the same time make substantial improvements in performance. These platforms use various types of specialised units for various fields. There is a special focus on graphics processing units and architectures inspired by the brain (for example, neural networks) due to their potential to exploit mass parallelism and their high energy efficiency. Extensions to existing architecture are proposed combined with innovative accelerators and functional units. The final result of this project is to design platforms that provide new experiences for users in the areas of cognitive computing and computational intelligence in mobile devices and in servers and data centres.
The project is approximately half-way through and the most relevant results to date include: