Nvidia on Monday said it is leading a team awarded 25 million dollars by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create a chip that leaves today's super computers in the dust.

The Nvidia team was on of four granted DARPA research contracts aimed at making supercomputers a thousand times more powerful with technology from graphics processing units (GPUs) used to power realistic videogame action.

Graphics chips (GPUs) break complex tasks into parts and handle them simultaneously while central processing units typically used in computers tend to projects in sequence, hurrying from start to finish in order.

"This recognizes Nvidia's substantial investments in the field of parallel processing and highlights GPU computing's position as one of the most promising paths to exascale computing," said Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally.

"We look forward to collaborating to develop programmable, scalable systems that operate in tight power budgets and deliver increases in performances that are many orders of magnitude above today's systems."

Nvidia team members include Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; Seattle-based supercomputer company Cray Inc., and a set of US universities.