IBM Research has uncovered work it is doing to bring the brain's processing power to computers, in an effort to make it easier for PCs to process vast amounts of data in real time. The researchers want to put brain-related senses like perception and interaction into hardware and software so that computers are able to process and understand the data quicker while consuming less power, said Dharmendra Modha, a researcher at IBM. The researchers are bringing the neuroscience, nanotechnology and supercomputing fields together in an effort to create the new computing platform, he said.
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Member since:2006-05-26
Perhaps you're unaware of the Sony PlayStation 3, and the XBox 360 for the most consumer-visible uses? Or that IBM still sells their high-end stuff with advancing POWER-based processors, though most people don't see that? More importantly, there's a huge number of PPC-based microcontrollers used in the embedded world. Perhaps not as many as x86-based systems these days, but they're not truly dying, so much as hiding in plain sight.
That being said, there's currently no microprocessors that are inherently good at doing the sort of task they're looking to do, regardless of how efficient/powerful they are: they simply don't have the correct scaling in terms of connections, regardless of speed and bitness, to compare to a brain, which is horribly slow (I believe I've read that nerve impulses are somewhere around 200 mph, please correct me if I'm wrong) but which is massively parallel, self-organizing and repairing, and incredibly efficient in terms of energy use compared to any electronics we currently have for performing the task. It doesn't help that as of yet, we still don't have a complete understanding of how and why brains form the way they do...
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