In yesterday's issue of the journal Science there is a research article about IBM's new chip called "TrueNorth" that has logical architecture similar to the mammalian neocortex. It has 256 million electronic synapses; that's about as complex as the brain of a bee. The power density of TrueNorth is only .02 Watts per cm^2 of chip area, for a conventional CPU it it's close to 100 Watts. Terrence J. Sejnowski, director of the Salk Institute’s Computational Neurobiology Laboratory said "The TrueNorth chip is like the first transistor, it will take many generations before it can compete, but when it does, it will be a scalable architecture that can be delivered to cellphones". Horst Simon, deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said "It is a remarkable achievement in terms of scalability and low power consumption". The following is the abstract of the August 8 2014 article:
*"Inspired by the brain’s structure, we have developed an efficient, scalable, and flexible non–von Neumann architecture that leverages contemporary silicon technology. To demonstrate, we built a 5.4-billion-transistor chip with 4096 neurosynaptic cores interconnected via an intrachip network that integrates 1 million programmable spiking neurons and 256 million configurable synapses. Chips can be tiled in two dimensions via an interchip communication interface, seamlessly scaling the architecture to a cortexlike sheet of arbitrary size. The architecture is well suited to many applications that use complex neural networks in real time, for example, multiobject detection and classification. With 400-pixel-by-240-pixel video input at 30 frames per second, the chip consumes 63 milliwatts. "* John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
