Intel’s neurochips could one day end up in PCs or a cloud service

You may have heard before about Intel's Loihi neuromorphic chips that mimic the way brains work, but what hasn't been clear yet is how the chipmaker will make money from the experimental silicon. In a recent roundtable with journalists, Intel Labs lead Rich Uhlig offered two possibilities: integrating Loihi in a CPU for PCs to …

[msobkow]

Lor! They're assembling you again?

-- Data

[Arthur the cat]

neuromorphic chips that mimic the way brains work

If they work anything like my brain they're going to be very slow and inaccurate when first switched on and will need a large dose of caffeine and an hour of farting about before they really start to function properly.

[Denarius]

Debatable claim. How parts of brains work is known in outline. Visual and speech processing for instance. Specialised sections recognise lines, colours etc. Fine. Memory ? Partly as there are several types of human brain memory. As for how our brains work, I thought that was a long way away. We know some brain parts functions well, but how the whole works ? Still worth working on as the classic Von Neuman architectures seem to be approaching end game

[bombastic bob]

I am intrigued by the possibilities

Looking forward to having voice command and general speech recognition that does NOT transmit what I say (or room background noise) to "the cloud" but instead keeps it on some device that I own and have control over.

I'd also like to see this as a USB HID device with hotkey support and things like that. Or it could even be a new class of HID device (not a keyboard or mouse or touch screen) with the kinds of capabilities that allow you to input hot-key combinations or "run this application" kinds of commands.

All good, I think! And, NO "out to the cloud" with what I'm saying or what background noises are in the room at the moment...

[sreynolds]

Intel never innovates

I thought that our brains were analogue. Therefore, I cannot see any comparitors, multipliers summers or any other analogue type devices - is there even a single opamp, so please stop calling it like "our brain". Try a digital representation of what our brain might look like.

[M.V. Lipvig]

If I...

... shut a computer with neural chips off, did I just commit murder? If I run Windows on it, am I committing mental abuse? If I sell it, am I engaged in trafficing in sentient beings?

And finally, if I impress female engrams upon the chip, will it be surly one week every month, and illogical the other 3 weeks?

[sreynolds]

Re: If I...

It depends on which trimester it is in. If its in the first 13 weeks of its life, err, inception, then you should be fine.

[sreynolds]

Re: If I...

Unless of course if you use a piece of steel about 1/10" to an 1/8" thick, you know the type that dry cleaners use, in which case you might have some problems.

[Dhm]

I find it somewhat amusing that Loihi is still being pushed up the hill when commercial deals, everywhere, are being written by Akida. When will Intel have Loihi ready for commercialisation? 2 years?