Intel’s most powerful “neuromorphic” chips use the human brain as a model
By: Faisal Khan
Tags: Neuroscience, Technology, Innovation, Future, Artificial Intelligence

A photo shows Intel’s latest neuromorphic system, Pohoiki Springs, and one of the rows within it. The system unveiled in March 2020 integrates 768 Loihi neuromorphic research chips inside a chassis the size of five standard servers. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

Intel’s most powerful “neuromorphic” chips use the human brain as a model

The chip giant is designing computer systems with the computational capacity of 100 million neurons

Computer chips in a traditional computer are the brains of the system but function much less like a human brain. Neuromorphic Computing is the emerging field in technology that continues to expand and evolve. The current CPUs and GPUs do a satisfactory job of processing complex calculations, but innovations like AI has created the need for computers that can process unstructured and noisy data in real-time — much like how our brain neurons do.

Although traditional computer chips are pretty good at crunching complex and large sets of data, they lack the capability when it comes to abstract data, like spotting a difference between two different animals — something that our brain can do effortlessly. The data pathways in our brains are called neurons, which perform all these tasks.

Researchers are now working to replicate the same process in computer chips. It was only recently that I wrote about how Scientists at the University of Bath now seem to have decoded the bizarre behavior of neurons and replicated it on tiny silicon chips. Intel has now gone one step further.

It has produced the most powerful neuromorphic research system providing the computational capacity of 100 million neurons. This puts the new system at par with the brain of a small mammal. Pohoiki Springs is the latest and most advanced system which integrates 768 Loihi neuromorphic in a casing that is the size of five standard servers.

The system lays the foundation for an autonomous, connected future, which will require new approaches to real-time, dynamic data processing. ~ Intel Blog

Even better is the fact that such a complex system is not an energy-guzzling machine like other comparable servers. According to Mike Davies, director of Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab, Pohoiki Springs has increased the capacity of the Loihi neuromorphic research chip by more than 750x, while operating at a power level of under 500 watts.

Pohoiki Springs is a cloud-based system that will be made available to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC) to further their research to solve more complex problems. Some of the promising future applications include the following scalable algorithms:

Constraint satisfaction problems can be accelerated by exploring varying solutions in parallel.

parallel. Finding optimal paths in graphs and patterns.

Real-world optimization problems like maximizing the bandwidth of a wireless communication channel or minimizing risk in a stock portfolio.

Neuromorphic systems basically replicate, communicate and learn like a human brain but at the hardware level. And the eventual goal is to use neuroscience to develop chips that function less like traditional computers and more like the human brain.