Page 41 - EPISTLE-THE VOICE OF SENSE

As the name goes on for neuromorphic computing, mimic the

brain. In the human brain, neuron communicates with each other

through spikes of electrochemical energy. These spikes does not

contain much information’s, therein when the existence of

hundreds of millions of spikes are together happening

simultaneously, it exhibits refined information processing that

allows understanding the paradigm of this computing. The

SpiNNaker supercomputer developed borrows from the brain’s

design in so far as the processor cores send billions of small
packets of information to tens of thousands of destinations within

the system. This is different from the way a normal computer

routes information, which usually involves much larger packets of

information because they must also tell the system how to route

the information. The SpiNNaker supercomputer is able to

drastically reduce packet size because the transmission of

information is handled by the custom chips.

Marching towards the era of this computing, Intel Labs has

developed a neuromorphic research chip named “Loihi” this year

2018 which includes many digital circuits that exactly mimic the

brain’s basic operation. This Loihi articulates the combination of

training and inference on a single chip with a vision of making
machine learning more dynamic and efficient. Thereby

Neuromorphic chips could ultimately be used anywhere real world

data needs to be processed and handled in evolving real-time

environments. These chips could enable smart city infrastructure

designed for real-time communication along with autonomous

vehicles for the future fifth Industrial revolution.