This month, August 2014, IBM
unveiled "TrueNorth". It is the most advanced and powerful computer
chip of its kind ever built. This neurosynaptic processor is the
first to achieve one million individually programmable neurons,
sixteen times more than the current largest neuromorphic chip. It is
designed to mimic the structure of the human brain and is uniquely
different from other computer architectures.
TrueNorth is the largest IBM chip ever fabricated, with 5.4 billion
transistors at 28 nanometers (A human hair is approximately 80,000-
100,000 nanometers wide) and it consumes orders of magnitude less
power than a typical modern processor. IBM hopes this combination of
ultra-efficient power consumption and entirely new system
architecture will allow computers to far more accurately emulate the
brain.
TrueNorth is composed of 4,096 cores, with each of these modules
integrating memory, computation and communication. The cores are
able to continue operating when individual cores fail, similar to a
biological system.