IBM Creates Custom-Made Brain-Like Chip

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.

IBM and chips

[jbolden]

It is getting hard to figure out where IBM is on chips. Arguably the 4 main chips experiencing investment are: x86, ARM, Z-Series processors and POWER series 2 of which are IBM. OTOH there is no roadmap for POWER beyond the current generation. I'd love to know is IBM getting more serious about CPUs or pulling back?

to save others googling

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of neurons in the brain varies dramatically from species to species. One estimate (published in 1988) puts the human brain at about 100 billion (10^11) neurons and 100 trillion (10^14) synapses.

100 billion divided by 1 million = 100,000 of these chips to reach the human neuron count.
100 trillion divided by 256 million = 390,625 of these chips to reach human synapse count.

Assuming Moores Law for these chips with a doubling every 24 months to be conservative.
2 of these on a chip in 2016
4 of these on a chip in 2018
8 of these on a chip in 2020
16 of these on a chip in 2022
32 of these on a chip in 2024
64 of these on a chip in 2026
128 of these on a chip in 2028
256 of these on a chip in 2030
512 of these on a chip in 2032
1024 of these on a chip in 2034
2048 of these on a chip in 2036
4096 of these on a chip in 2038
8192 of these on a chip in 2040
16384 of these on a chip in 2042
32768 of these on a chip in 2044
65536 of these on a chip in 2046
131072 of these on a chip in 2048
262144 of these on a chip in 2050

So we could be seeing human brain capabilities on a chip by mid century. Quite possible we'd see similar capabilities built as a supercomputer 10-20 years before that. Don't flame for the wild assumptions I'm making here - i know there are a lot, this is just intended as some back of the envelope calculations.

There is POWER9 on the roadmaps

[Henriok]

I agree i your initial statement, but that's pretty much as it has been for at least 15 years or so. POWER9 is on the roadmaps, and the next generation zArch too. And they are sitting there like proxy boxes with nothing much spced, like it has been for almost all previous generations of their predecessors. What I'm concerned with is the lack of public roadmap for what they are planning in the HPC and super computer space. We had the very public Blue Gene project that began in 2001 with four projects; C, L, P and Q, but since the Blue Gene/Q came to life a couple of years ago, I have no idea what they are planning. It'd be nice to have some clue here.. Why not something from the OpenPOWER Foundation; A P8 host processor with integrated GPU from nVidia, on chip networking from Mellanox and programmable accelerators from Altera. But I haven't seen anything in that direction.