IBM's New NeuroChip: True North

摘要

HPCWire reports: "IBM researchers have developed a super-efficient chip inspired by the functioning of the human brain. Named TrueNorth, the chip features 5.4 billion transistors arranged in a network of 4,096 neurosynaptic cores, yielding the equivalent of one million neurons and 256 million synapses. "Despite being one of the largest CMOS chips ever built, TrueNorth consumes just 70mW during real-time operation. The chip was built for IBM by Samsung Electronics using 28nm process technology. This is the latest breakthrough to come out of the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program, which has received $53 million in funding since 2008 from the Pentagon's DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), "...each core integrating memory, computation and communication. Cores operate without a clock in an event-driven fashion and the distributed mesh network supports very fast parallel processing that is inherently fault tolerant. Perhaps most impressive is the device's energy profile. The chip has a power density of 20mW/cm~2, nearly four orders of magnitude less than today's microprocessors."