by Deepa Kurup, the Hindu
Legendary designer of the ARM chip Steve Furber, says “The brain has properties that we struggle to achieve. Your brain is a million times more power efficient than the best processor we have.” They exhibit massively parallelism in processing, are a huge network of neurons and are “astonishingly” power efficient, explains the professor, who carries on his research as ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Which is why his latest project, the SpinNaker, popularly called the ‘Brain Box’, attempts to evolve a computational model that is inspired from the maze of parallel neural networks that are “pinging” inside our brain. Modelled in two-dimension, the mesh is a multi-core processor called the SpinNaker chip, that comprises 20 processing cores. It establishes parallelism by connecting to its local peers through a network that provides high bandwidth communication. The interconnection pattern is meant to evolve, similar to how a brain learns.
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/article923656.ece
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