IBM Cooks Up a New Silicon Brain

By Stacey Higginbotham

What you are about to read is not science fiction. IBM, the 100-year-old company that started out making old-fashioned cash registers and “business tabulating machines” has come up with a new chip that marries our brain’s architecture with silicon guts. Like people, it learns instead of being programmed and like a good semiconductor, it’s easy to make based on today’s chip production technologies. While it might have started out as a research project seeking to develop chips that deliver mor oomph while being stingy about power consumption, today it is a radical idea that takes computing to more places and in doing so potentially unleashes new waves of innovation.

A soup-to-nuts approach.

That’s the hope anyway, although IBM isn’t alone in its efforts to rethink the way computers are built. HP has a different initiativeaaimed at creating chips that can process more data more power efficiently by changing the basic building blocks inside the chip. Other companies and labs are eyeing quantum computing and other far-fetched ideas (GigaOM Pro sub req’d). But IBM being IBM has both the money and the vision to bring an entirely new way of computing forward — in fact it has been laying the groundwork for years.

Remember these commercials where IBM can tell someone in corporate HQ where a single item is on a truck out in the middle of nowhere? These commercials are from 2005, and ever since IBM has been building the infrastructure in terms of its services business, its software and even with hardware designed to process massive amounts of information on the fly. Watson, the Jeopardy-playing computer is a wonderful example of how far IBM was willing to take the hardware. But most people there knew the hardware was never going to get to the place where IBM’s customers could not only locate one of thousands of trucks to tell it that it was lost, but to the point where the customers could measure everything about that truck from its speed to the temperature inside the containers it held and than send alerts based on those variables. And the system could do all this while consuming a kilowatt of power and in a box the size of a shoebox.

Using brainpower to solve architecture problems.

That’s where this new silicon comes in. IBM calls them neurosynaptic chips, and it’s architected in a completely different way than current semiconductors. Instead of creating silicon that has a processing core, a bus and a memory cache, IBM has taken a page from the human brain. The integrated memory is represented by synapses, computation by neurons and communication by axons. The current version is far less impressive than the human brain which has billion of neurons — this chip has 256. But the breakthrough here is not just about the new architecture but what that architecture means and where it fits in with the future of computing.