Improved brains . . . . . . for computers

IBM has designed a new kind of computer chip called NorthPole based on the architecture of the human brain. A news item that Nature published comments:
‘Mind-blowing’ IBM chip speeds up AI

The NorthPole . . . . where's Santa?

A brain-inspired computer chip that could supercharge artificial intelligence (AI) by working faster with much less power has been developed by researchers at IBM in San Jose, California. Their massive NorthPole processor chip eliminates the need to frequently access external memory, and so performs tasks such as image recognition faster than existing architectures do — while consuming vastly less power.

“Its energy efficiency is just mind-blowing,” says Damien Querlioz, a nanoelectronics researcher at the University of Paris-Saclay in Palaiseau. The work, published in Science, shows that computing and memory can be integrated on a large scale, he says. “I feel the paper will shake the common thinking in computer architecture.”

NorthPole runs neural networks: multi-layered arrays of simple computational units programmed to recognize patterns in data. A bottom layer takes in data, such as the pixels in an image; each successive layer detects patterns of increasing complexity and passes information on to the next layer. The top layer produces an output that, for example, can express how likely an image is to contain a cat, a car or other objects.

Some computer chips can handle these calculations efficiently, but they still need to use external memory called RAM each time they calculate a layer. Shuttling data between chips in this way slows things down — a phenomenon known as the Von Neumann bottleneck, after mathematician John von Neumann, who first conceived the standard architecture of computers based on a processing unit and a separate memory unit.

The Von Neumann bottleneck is one of the most significant factors that slow computer applications — including AI. It also results in energy inefficiencies.

NorthPole is made of 256 computing units, or cores, each of which contains its own memory. “You’re mitigating the Von Neumann bottleneck within a core,” says Modha, who is IBM’s chief scientist for brain-inspired computing at the company’s Almaden research centre in San Jose.


By Germaine: Not a computer expert, but a different kind of expert

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