Blog: Army of Smartphone Chips Could Emulate the Human Brain

Army of Smartphone Chips Could Emulate the Human Brain
New Scientist (05/04/10) Marks, Paul

University of Manchester computer scientist Steve Furber wants to build a silicon-based brain that contains one billion neurons. "We're using bog-standard, off-the-shelf processors of fairly modest performance," Furber says. The silicon brain, called Spiking Neural Network Architecture (Spinnaker), is based on a processor Furber helped design in 1987. Spinnaker's chips contain 20 ARM processor cores, each modeling 1,000 neurons. With 20,000 neurons per chip, Furber needs 50,000 chips to reach his goal of one billion neurons. A memory chip next to each processor stores the changing synaptic weights as numbers that represent the importance of a given connection. As the system becomes more developed, the only computer able to compute the connections will be the machine itself, Furber says. Spinnaker relies on a controller to direct spike traffic, similar to a router for the Internet. The researchers have built a small version of the silicon brain with 50 neurons and have created a virtual environment in which Spinnaker controls a Pac-Man-like program that learns to find a virtual doughnut.

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