TrueNorth - a new generation processor

Strangely enough, no one wrote on Habré, but, in my opinion, a significant event happened today. IBM introduced a new, fully finished chip that implements a neural net. The program of its development, existed for a long time and was quite successful. Habré already had an article about a full-scale simulation .

The chip has 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses. Apparently, as in the simulation, the chip has a architecture similar to the neocortex.


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What is awesome cool? The fact that all today's neural networks must produce an astronomical number of operations, especially when learning. Often it comes down to performance. In real time on one device you can solve only simple puzzles. Parallelization to clusters and video cards significantly speeds up processing (due to the huge computational power and high power consumption). But everything depends on the main problem of the von Neumann architecture: the memory is separated from the processing units. In real neurons, everything is different: the memory itself performs processing (there is a cool cycle of articles about neural networks on Habré).

If IBM starts producing such processors, then many video analytics tasks can be solved directly on them. The simplest thing that comes to mind is the classification of objects in a video stream (people, cars, animals). This is exactly the task that IBM has demonstrated as an example of work. In the video stream 400 * 240 30fps, they singled out people, cyclists, cars, trucks and buses.

If everything is so cool, then robots will not soon require lidars, five camcorders with such a chip - and forward.



By the way, if you count the performance of such a chip in teraflops, you get an astronomical number. After all, in fact, such a chip is 1 million processors, in one clock cycle each of which processes information from 256 input channels (well, approximately).

Slightly more information on the IBM Research website.

Z.Y. Sorry for the article without special details in the style of Alizar, but I was really surprised that such a significant event passed by Habr.