Qualcomm to Build Neuro-Inspired Chips

Bismillah writes "At the MIT Technology Review EmTech conference, Qualcomm announced that the company and partners will design and make neural processing units or NPUs starting next year. NPUs mimic the neural structures and how the brain processes information in a massively parallel way, while being extremely power efficient, and may end up in self-learning devices."

Comments

Obligatory

[MassiveForces]

"At the MIT Technology Review EmTech conference, Cyberdyne announced that the company and partners will design and make neural processing units or NPUs starting next year."

A little thin on tech detail

[tttonyyy]

A quick google fails to reveal any detail about how it works, and TFA's explanatory diagram says very little (a drawing of a brain and some boxes - oh so that's how it works?)

We can only assume this stems from Qualcomm's partnership with Brain Corp http://www.braincorporation.com/

Re:A little thin on tech detail

[Anonymous Coward]

They're doing fpga's that come with programmer capable of partial programming of the fpga on the fly.

The brain is just marketing.

Re:A little thin on tech detail

[somersault]

I'd assume that they're building general purpose hardware for running large neural networks into the chips. Usually you'd set a goal for the network, and then "train" it, reinforcing the pathways that lead to successful outcomes. The theory is based on how our own brains learn, and can be very effective at solving certain problems "naturally", rather than the programming having to come up with an effective algorithmic solution.

Re:And cue the

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If they are going to mimic a human brain, all that Skynet is going to be doing will be ordering beer and streaming porn and sports events.

John

[Anonymous Coward]

'Qualcomm to build neuro inspired chips'

Probably not. I interviewed with them in San Diego a few years ago and was quite shocked by the lack of technical skills of the people performing the interviews and the chat style of technical interviewing (their lack of basic English skills also might have something to do with their inability to ask sensible questions too).

They may just buy a reference design from ARM to build Snapdragon processors and be very succesful with that but I honestly do not see those people developing neuro inspired chips. Not in a million years.

Cool.

[NoImNotNineVolt]

This seems rather interesting. I've dabbled in artificial neural networks out of curiosity. This seems like it could be really useful.

Neural nets are fast. Training them can be very slow, though. Backpropagation for multilayer perceptron nets is more computationally costly than simple feed-forward usage, and training a net can take many, many iterations if the training data set is large. Neural nets implemented in hardware could make this process much faster.

Of course, TFA doesn't have much detail. Are these chips going to be capable of "learning" like this? Or will you have to pre-load them with the appropriate matrix of interconnection-weights and only run them in feed-forward mode? If they can't actually do learning, I'd imagine the utility of such a device will be very limited.