How IBM's Cognitive Computer Works

http://ow.ly/6ebeC

Article in Forbes, by Alex Knapp, posted on LinkedIn by Charles Skamser.



This interesting article discussed the development of a new cognitive computer chip, and how it will advance the speed of information processing by computers. The article discusses an interview with Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha, who is the head of the SyNAPSE project.   The SyNAPSE team’s solution is to bypass von Neumann architecture, which all modern computers rely upon, entirely with cognitive computing. "The goal, says Dr. Modha, is a chip that’s able to better handle environmental feedback. “So far, our computers are left-brained, focusing on linearity and computation. What this is is a right-brained computer” capable of recognizing patterns and able to handle ambiguity. And because it’s operating in parallel, with an integrated memory, it uses much less power than a traditional processor.""

As the article states, "Dr. Modha likens processing to transporting oranges. The trees are memory, the oranges are bits. The consumers are processors. The oranges have to travel, by highway, to get to the consumer – but the more oranges, the more tied up traffic gets, so you run into problems on the chip....Solving this problem is the focus of computer scientists around the world. The SyNAPSE team’s solution is to bypass von Neumann architecture entirely with cognitive computing. To keep the orange grove analogy, the SyNAPSE team wants to, in Dr. Modha’s words, “move people to the orange grove” so the processors can be integrated with the memory."

This is an interesting insight into how the processors are arranged in a computer chip, and the efforts being made to build a better solution.