Chips and software that draw on the brain’s ability to do massive parallel processing could make for far smarter, more power-efficient technologies.
-Philippe. [Thank You MIT Technology Review | By Dave Talbot 10.10.13] Brain chip: Qualcomm CTO Matt Grob says the new technology will soon be ready to ship. The world’s largest smartphone chipmaker, Qualcomm, says it is ready to start helping partners manufacture a radically different kind of a chip—one that mimics the neural structures and processing methods found in the brain. The approach is emerging as a way to enable machines to perform complex tasks while consuming far less power. IBM has been prototyping similar chips (see “IBM Scientists Show Blueprints for Brainlike Computing),” and the area is the focus of intense research around the world (see “Building a Brain on a Silicon Chip” and “Intel Reveals Neuromorphic Chip Design”). Speaking in a sponsored talk at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference today, Qualcomm CTO Matt Grob said that by next year his company would take on partners to design and manufacture such chips for applications ranging from artificial vision sensors to robot controllers and even brain implants. The technology might also lead to smartphones that can sense and process information far more efficiently. Today’s computer systems are built with separate units for storing information and processing it sequentially, a design known as the Von Neumann architecture. By contrast, brainlike architectures process information in a distributed, parallel way, modeled after how the neurons and synapses work in a brain. Brain bot: Qualcomm has developed robots that use its neuro-inspired chips. Qualcomm has already developed new software tools that simulate activity in the brain. These networks, which model the way individual neurons convey information through precisely timed spikes, allow developers to write and compile biologically inspired programs. Qualcomm is using this approach to build a class of processors called neural processing units (NPUs). It envisions NPUs that are massively parallel, reprogrammable, and capable of cognitive tasks like classification and prediction. “What we’re talking about is scale, making it into a platform,” said Grob during his talk. “We want to make it easier for researchers to make a part of the brain.” |
head of product in colorado. travel 🚀 work 🌵 food 🍔 rocky mountains, tech and dogs 🐾Categories
All
|