P01YM47H

SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) is a multi-year IBM initiative whose bold long-term goal is to create a chip system with ten billion neurons and a hundred trillion synapses, while consuming 1 kilowatt of power and occupying less then 2 liters of volume.  I like people who can set the bar high, but that’s simply a stratospheric goal.  This may be achieved in 20-30 years.  Either way this is really cool tech.  A neuromorphic, or cognitive computing chip, goes beyond traditional von Neumann architecture in a way that is meant to replicate the neuron-axon-synapse interaction.  Memory here is integrated with the processor in a way to “mimic the brain’s event driven, distributed and parallel processing.”