IBM Creates Custom-Made Brain-Like Chip 105
An anonymous reader writes In a paper published Thursday in Science, IBM describes its creation of a brain-like chip called TrueNorth. It has "4,096 processor cores, and it mimics one million human neurons and 256 million synapses, two of the fundamental biological building blocks that make up the human brain." What's the difference between TrueNorth and traditional processing units? Apparently, TrueNorth encodes data "as patterns of pulses". Already, TrueNorth has a proven 80% accuracy in image recognition with a power consumption efficiency rate beating traditional processing units. Don't look for brain-like chips in the open market any time soon, though. TrueNorth is part of a DARPA research effort that may or may not translate into significant changes in commercial chip architecture and function.
Human Brain is...complicated (Score:3, Informative)
Brains are waay more complicated than just neurons and synapses. Just taking the neurotransmitters into account makes the whole charade crash down. Then there is the glial network that, surprise surprise, does an enormous amount of complex work. There's even recent research suggesting that the branching patterns of the neurons perform complex computations. There are chemical gradients in the brain that act as a sort of addressing system.
tl;dr Brain on a chip? Yeah fucking right.