IBM creates human brain-like computer chips

Venture Beat reports that IBM, who recently got its super computer Watson to successfully play in the TV game show Jeopardy, has announced it is working on a design for a new computer chip that will emulate how the human brain handles information. The project to create what IBM is calling cognitive computing chips is being worked on with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as well as a number of universities.

The research team has built its first brain-like computing units, with 256 neurons, an array of 256 by 256 (or a total of 65,536) synapses, and 256 axons. (A second chip had 262,144 synapses) In other words, it has the basic building block of processor, memory, and communications. This unit, or core, can be built with just a few million transistors (some of today's fastest microchips can be built with billions of transistors).

Modha said that this new kind of computing will likely complement, rather than replace, von Neumann machines, which have become good at solving problems involving math, serial processing, and business computations. The disadvantage is that those machines aren't scaling up to handle big problems well any more. They are using too much power and are harder to program.

The more powerful a computer gets, the more power it consumes, and manufacturing requires extremely precise and expensive technologies. And the more components are crammed together onto a single chip, the more they 'leak' power, even in stand-by mode. So they are not so easily turned off to save power.