‘Brain’ on a microchip getting closer with TrueNorth breakthrough

Computer science is edging close to manufacturing a brain, or at least an electronic cognition machine that operates as closely as possible to the speed and efficiency of the human cortex.

A coalition of IBM's research institutes and several universities and government laboratories delivered a preliminary answer on Thursday with a 5.4-billion transistor chip with 1 million programmable neurons and 256 million synapses.

The TrueNorth chip is the size of a postage stamp and 1,000 times as energy efficient as a conventional chip, according to a study published online on Thursday in the journal Science.

Don't expect to see the tiny supercomputer on your smartphone in the near future, although the lead researcher said his team was gaining momentum in that direction. He envisions a world populated with sensors that can process data at brain-like speeds, serving as guides for the blind or instant detectors of industrial toxins.

"The impossible has become possible, and the next step is to make possible real, in terms of commercial applications," said Dharmendra Modha, head of the cognitive computing group at IBM.

Modha and many others have been battling for decades because, for all the advances in processing speed, materials and manufacturing, digital computing relies on architecture from the 1940s. It has a well-known "bottleneck" between the processor and memory, named after the architect himself, John von Neumann.

Supercomputers that have hurdled the von Neumann bottleneck have accomplished stunning feats, but also have energy requirements that vie with some towns, and have grown larger than the laboratory-sized calculating machines of the infancy of computers.