Re:IBM Chip Processes Data Similar to the Way Your Brain Does
by stdgy on Thursday August 07, 2014 @03:34PM
(#8149694)
This is something I'm interested in discovering as well. I view most of these developments as modular components that could be used in conjunction with existing processor pipelines. For instance, with these 'neural' chips, I could imagine an existing processor querying the neural chip to look for particular activation patterns. Though I'm not too sure on the language one would use to specify which patterns to look for... Perhaps you could extract the parameters from the neural chip itself through a learning process, which you'd then use to bootstrap the process a bit and know what to look for? I'd imagine a lot of formal research is still needed here.
Neat developments, excited to see how they shake out.
Re:IBM Chip Processes Data Similar to the Way Your Brain Does
by apw on Thursday August 07, 2014 @04:57PM
(#8150101)
One possibility is to use the neuromorphic chips as souped-up branch predictors -- instead of predicting one bit, as in a branch predictor, predict all bits relevant for speculative execution. This can effect large-scale automatic parallelization.
See this paper at ASPLOS '14 for details:
http://hips.seas.harvard.edu/content/asc-automatically-scala...
Re:IBM Chip Processes Data Similar to the Way Your Brain Does
by 14113 on Thursday August 07, 2014 @03:07PM
(#8149515)
That is definitely be something plausible. From what I've seen, there's a lot of work at the moment in trying to write languages and toolkits to automatically target hetrogenous platforms - which this could be slotted into nicely.
Just an uneducated wild-thought.