Invented by researchers at IBM, the entirely new type of chip has been called ‘neurosynaptic’, because it responds to changes in the environment just like our brains do. "We have taken inspiration from the cerebral cortex to design this chip," IBM chief scientist for brain-inspired computing, Dharmendra Modha, told Rob Lever at Phys.org.
Unlike existing chips, that are essentially number-crunching calculators, these new computer chips can respond to the sights, smells and sounds from the environment around them to ‘learn’ and respond to different situations. They do this by using an expansive network of silicon transistors, one billion of which act like neurons and 256 million of which act like synapses in the human brain. "What that means, essentially, is that the chip can encode data as patterns of pulses, which is similar to one of the many ways neuroscientists think the brain stores information," says Daniela Hernandez at Wired.
The chip also boasts 4,096 cores and a total of 5.4 billion transistors, and it's barely the size of a postage stamp. To put that in perspective, the first generation of this chip was released in 2011, and it had just one core and 262,144 synapses. And that was hailed as revolutionary at the time.
The applications of this chip appear to be many, Modha told Phys.org, saying that it "has the potential to transform society" with a new generation of computing technology. Applications include installing the chip into an electric car so it can use the sensory information around it to see an accident before it happens and alert the driver. It could also give a smartphone the ability to take smells and visual cues from the environment and interpret them in real time for the user.
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