IBM Releases New Artificial Intelligence Chip

SyNapse, a new chip released by IBM, is closer to copying the human brain.

By communicating in the same way our brain's neurons are connected, it represents the next leap in neuromorphic computing.

It has roughly a million digital equivalents of neurons and 256 million digital equivalents to synapses. The neurons and synapses intertwine and individual neurons only fire when they receive instructions from another neuron.

Modeled after mammalian brains, every 250 neurons are organized into 4,096 identical blocks, and data is processed in circuits.

SyNapse was able to demonstrate it can recognize distinct objects such as people, automobiles and bicycles from the video of a road intersection.

A laptop programmed to do the identical task took 100 times longer and consumed 100,000 times more power.

IBM intends to connect thousands of these SyNapse chips to create a supercomputer capable of problem-solving similar to humans.

Conventional computing stores data and processes in separate blocks of memory shuttling back and forth between the two to execute a solution. SyNapse chips don't require the separation, so they are faster.

SyNapse can accomplish what it takes massive parallel computing can accomplish today. But there is a downside: SyNapse will require programmers to master a whole new way of coding. For this, IBM has created a suite of code-writing tools.

IBM revealed details about SyNapse in the journal Science.