IBM’S Brain Like ChipCOGNITIVE COMPUTING

What is cognitive computing?

Cognitive computing aims to emulate the human brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. The neurosynaptic chip, designed to emulate the neurons and synapses in the human brain, breaks path with traditional architectures used for the last 70 years.

How it works The new so-called nanofluidic circuit

works a little bit like a network of streams. A charged fluid moves over the surface of the circuit changing its properties (e.g. flipping a switch "on" or "off") with the positively and negatively charged atoms in the fluid. Like the synapses of the brain, the ions operate in three dimensions, a game changer in terms of efficiency and uncharted territory in terms of computing. "We could form or disrupt connections just in the same way a synaptic connection in the brain could be remade, or the strength of that connection could be adjusted, It's a little bit easier to visualize. Below, the green represents the ionic fluid and the orange is the surface. 

Unprecedented scale 2011 2014

Different from a standard chip Traditional chips run all of the time. This new neuro synaptic chip is event-driven and operates only when it needs to, resulting in a cooler operating environment and lower energy use.

The chip is especially designed for low power consumption, which can clearly be seen in this thermal image that shows the cool TrueNorth chip alongside hot FPGA chips that are feeding data to TrueNorth.

New architectureIBM's brain-inspired architecture consists of a network of neurosynaptic cores. Cores are distributed and operated in parallel. Core operate -without a clock- in an event-driven fashion. Cores integrate memory, computation, and communication. Individual cores can fail and yet, like the brain, the architecture can still function. Cores on the same chip communicate with one another via an on-chip event-driven network. Chips communicate via an inter-chip interface leading to seamless scalability like the cortex, enabling creation of scalable neuromorphic systems.

Traditional computers separate memory from computation, requiring bits to continually shuffle between memory and the CPU via a bus. This means power must increase as the communication rate (clock frequency) increases. In contrast, the brain operates a low “clock” frequency and with low power density.

In IBM’s new TrueNorth chip, computation, memory, and communication are intimately integrated, which leads to low power operation.

Ecosystem

IBM has developed an end-to-end ecosystem for developing applications on these brain-inspired chips that includes a simulator, a programming language, sample algorithms/applications, a library, and a teaching curriculum.