New Chip Function Similar To Human Brain–DARPA

[Buster's Uncle]

New Chip Function Similar To Human Brain–DARPA
24/7 Wall St.
By Douglas A. McIntyre  9 hours ago



DARPA-funded researchers have developed one of the world’s largest and most complex computer chips ever produced—one whose architecture is inspired by the neuronal structure of the brain and requires only a fraction of the electrical power of conventional chips.

Designed by researchers at IBM in San Jose, California, under DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program, the chip is loaded with more than 5 billion transistors and boasts more than 250 million “synapses,” or programmable logic points, analogous to the connections between neurons in the brain. That’s still orders of magnitude fewer than the number of actual synapses in the brain, but a giant step toward making ultra-high performance, low-power neuro-inspired systems a reality.

Many tasks that people and animals perform effortlessly, such as perception and pattern recognition, audio processing and motor control, are difficult for traditional computing architectures to do without consuming a lot of power. Biological systems consume much less energy than current computers attempting the same tasks. The SyNAPSE program was created to speed the development of a brain-inspired chip that could perform difficult perception and control tasks while at the same time achieving significant energy savings.

The SyNAPSE-developed chip, which can be tiled to create large arrays, has one million electronic “neurons” and 256 million electronic synapses between neurons. Built on Samsung Foundry's 28nm process technology, the 5.4 billion transistor chip has one of the highest transistor counts of any chip ever produced.  Each chip consumes less than 100 milliWatts of electrical power during operation. When applied to benchmark tasks of pattern recognition, the new chip achieved two orders of magnitude in energy savings compared to state-of-the-art traditional computing systems.

The high energy efficiency is achieved, in part, by distributing data and computation across the chip, alleviating the need to move data over large distances. In addition, the chip runs in an asynchronous manner, processing and transmitting data only as required, similar to how the brain works. The new chip’s high energy efficiency makes it a candidate for defense applications such as mobile robots and remote sensors where electrical power is limited.


http://news.yahoo.com/chip-function-similar-human-brain-095144426.html

[Buster's Uncle]

IBM’s chip story — it’s complicated
Gigaom
By Barb Darrow  6 hours ago



You could be forgiven for thinking that IBM is of two minds when it comes to chips.

On the one hand, it’s obvious that Big Blue is trying to offload its chip-making business. It may even have offered to pay GlobalFoundries $1 billion to take that operation of its hands,  according to Bloomberg News, citing an unnamed source. That seems crazy until you realize that it’s a money-lower — by some estimates that business costs IBM $1.5 billion a year and CEO Ginni Rometty is trying to shed non-profitable businesses. The company’s sale of X386 server business to Lenovo is still pending. (I’ve reached out to IBM and GlobalFoundries for comment, but expect there will be none.)

On the other hand, check out all the headlines today about the brainiac chip IBM Researchers have developed.

As summarized in the journal Science, which published a paper about the breakthrough, the researchers:

“applied our present knowledge of the structure and function of the brain to design a new computer chip that uses the same wiring rules and architecture. The flexible, scalable chip operated efficiently in real time, while using very little power.”


IBM promises a chip that thinks like a brain

By mimicking how neurons, synapses and other parts of the brain work to solve problems, IBM said this “SyNAPSE” silicon can recognize patterns and classify objects in a very power-efficient way. This silicon, which IBM claims is the world’s first “neurosynaptic” computer chip, can combine a million programmable neurons, 256 million programmable synapses and 46 billion synaptic operations per second per watt, according to a press release which added that a postage-stamp-sized computer running this chip would run on the equivalent of a hearing aid battery.

Putting an array of these chips together in a neural network could solve all sorts of complex problems, is the thinking here.

Or as the New York Times’ John Markoff wrote:

The chip’s electronic “neurons” are able to signal others when a type of data — light, for example — passes a certain threshold. Working in parallel, the neurons begin to organize the data into patterns suggesting the light is growing brighter, or changing color or shape.

The processor may thus be able to recognize that a woman in a video is picking up a purse, or control a robot that is reaching into a pocket and pulling out a quarter. Humans are able to recognize these acts without conscious thought, yet today’s computers and robots struggle to interpret them.


IBM chip plan: Stick with R&D, dump manufacturing?

So that’s some smart silicon, but how does that square with talk that IBM getting out of the chip-making business? Well, it’ really not that much a contradiction. IBM has said it will continue to invest in chip R&D — last month it announced a $3 billion investment to create chip technologies for next-gen computing, big data and cognitive systems.

But there’s a distinction between designing chips for the future and manufacturing those chips once that’s done for broader use. Why not offload that capital intensive fab work to companies specializing in it?

The bigger worry about IBM is that the R&D that the company is so famous for has been deemphasized and cut back. I suspect that  this is the case, although breakthroughs like this one, allay some of those concerns.


http://news.yahoo.com/ibm-chip-story-complicated-133459071.html