IBM Research, alongside members of Cornell Tech and iniLabs, has produced a chip called "TrueNorth" that contains the same number of "neurons" as a frog's brain. The Samsung Electronics-built 4,096-core processor SyNAPSE chip contains a million neurons and has 5.4 billion CMOS transistor gates. Designed by Cornell Tech, the chip's asynchronous processor consumes only 70mW of power. Full details will be released in the "Science" journal on 8 August 2014.
IBM's website described the chip as "A neurosynaptic supercomputer the size of a postage stamp that runs on the energy equivalent of a hearing-aid battery, this technology could transform science, technology, business, government, and society by enabling vision, audition, and multi-sensory applications". IBM added 16 TrueNorth chips to a single circuit board. This produced a system with "sixteen million programmable neurons and four billion programmable synapses".
IBM's work is funded by DARPA, a US government body which has to date invested $53 million into the activity that produced the chip, the ultimate aim of which is to produce a chip that replicates the human brain's capabilities.
“It is an astonishing achievement to leverage a process traditionally used for commercially available, low-power mobile devices to deliver a chip that emulates the human brain by processing extreme amounts of sensory information with very little power,” explained Samsung Electronics' Vice President of Foundry Marketing, Shawn Han on IBM's website. “This is a huge architectural breakthrough that is essential as the industry moves toward the next-generation cloud and big-data processing. It’s a pleasure to be part of technical progress for next-generation through Samsung’s 28nm technology”.
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