True North Technology: IBM Introduces Super Chip ago – Gulli

In the past week, the US-based technology company IBM introduced an amazing computer chip that exceeds the capacity of current chips to many times before. The concoction is based on the workings of the human brain. Consequently, the names of the various hardware components remember their neurobiological models. The chip has 4096 single “neurosynaptic cores” that are able to store information, to process and exchange ideas. The construct is to make a total of 46 billion synaptic mathematical operations are possible – in a single second per Watt. Here, grab the respective cores on a storage capacity of 100,000 bits, 56 million synapses and neurons 1 million back. In addition, the individual cores are activated only when they are needed, without running in the background before it, so that a chip consumes just 70 milliwatts.

The real technological breakthrough was the decision of the True North-creator possible, which consisted from the conventional architecture for microprocessors – to say goodbye – also known as the von Neumann design. In the von Neumann model, a clear separation between cores will save the data and those that conduct the processes undertaken shrunk

Chip -. Performance increased

The design of the True North Technology goes back to the collaboration of IBM and researchers at Cornell University in New York. The project was also supported by the U.S. military with cash injections totaling 53 million U.S. dollars since the year 2008. The chip was built, however, the South Korean manufacturer Samsung devices. The Group thereby used the same technological possibilities such as in the manufacture of microprocessors for mobile devices.

Project Dharmendra Modha presented with his team already in 2011 a first die before that was based on the human brain. But at that time the prototype had only 1,024 cores. How Modha reported on the official research blog of IBM, it is his team together with True North now succeeded the chip to shrink to a 15-fold but to increase its capacity by 100 times in parallel. / Rc