http://www.osnews.com/story/20570/IBM_Tries_to_Bring_Brain_Power_to_Computers Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:01:11 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?338052 http://osnews.com/thread?338052 Maybe they will bring brain power to computers, but not bring back POWER. POWER and PowerPC are dying platforms, lacking a proper commercial support and the guilty companies are not only IBM but all the members of POWER.org.

Back to the topic and abandoning this play of words, this means to implementing features before exclusive to brains into the computing world. I think the title is a bit sensationalistic and looks like one from theinquirer.co.uk. It makes you confuse about what's the news about, like meaning you can connect your brain for having more processing power on your computer. This would be interesting for certain kind of users, as most people use their brain extremelly too little and computer ricers will love to be able to make this so they can compile their Gentoo packages a lot faster or having some more more frames per second on their resource hungry games.Edited 2008-11-22 03:53 UTC Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (timofonic) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?338059 http://osnews.com/thread?338059 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... Sat, 22 Nov 2008 07:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (JonathanBThompson) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?338067 http://osnews.com/thread?338067 Dear Big Blue, please please please... make this brain-like processing power cross-platform so it can eventually be ported to some users I know...
Thank you! Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (UglyKidBill) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?338105 http://osnews.com/thread?338105 Thank you!! Nice irony and a very good laugh!! Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (acobar) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?338199 http://osnews.com/thread?338199 how about "Skynet"? Has a nice ring to it.

Seriously, do these R&D guys ever get to go see a movie? Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (remaincrunchy) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?338437 http://osnews.com/thread?338437 If only IBM can put that much brain power into their upper management levels. Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (macrules) Comments