Quote:
Originally Posted by Gargamel
I'm really not believing this, unless it's only being purchased as a tiny tiny research platform for DARPA and USAF to work on. I don't see this as being that news worthy, given the specs, as neural networks have been under development for decades.
The article reads more like a brochure ad than a real news article.
But it lists it at 7" high that fits on a standard server rack. That's really small. And it says it only has 64m neurons. The human brain has 100 billion. It's a simple little test project, nothing more.
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Well, the article
did say the purchaser was the Air Force
Research Lab, so you're right about that...
However, there is a bigger picture: while the described module is only 64M neurons, remember that an awful lot of the technology we use today and take for granted started out on a scale much, much smaller than in use now and at speed, capability, and power consumption specs unimagined as practical when those technologies first appeared. The idea you can power a device of 64M neurons on just 19 watts is a very impressive accomplishment. Much as how WATSON was a game-changer for cognitive data processing, the capabilities of TrueNorth open the door to abstract cognitive processing. True, its only 64M neurons now, but I can easily remember when a RAM chip of 1MB was a really big deal; and, much like RAM, if you take roughly 1600 of the TrueNorth units as they stand now and find a way to network them, say through a WATSON-type system, numerically you have your 100B neurons...
Here are a couple of links about TrueNorth:
From IBM Research --
http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/brain-chip.shtml
..and if you really want to go deep into TrueNorth, here's a detailed article from the
Proceedings of the National Academy Of Sciences of the United States of America --
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/41/11441.full
(It has pictures and everything...
...)...
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