What percentage of readers know you could fill a football stadium with these chips and for many tasks it wouldn't come close to a human brain with today's knowledge of software? I love news like this just feels like analogies using brains are easy to overhype.
I think work like this is very important. In the 1940s you could fill a football stadium with about 50 ENIAC computers and you wouldn't have 1/1000th the processing power of an Iphone. Your statement gives useful perspective in one direction, but exponential improvement cannot be ignored. There can't be any doubt that neuromorphic chips have a lot of wiggle room to explode in capability in the coming decades.
> have a lot of wiggle room to explode in capability in the coming decades.
Are you sure about that? CPU speeds have not improved in years. We appear to have hit a maximum, at least for now. (Of course I can't predict the future, but it's been years now and no change.)
Otherwise we would still be using (very cheap) Pentiums IV.
In a way, it's a testament to human ingenuity that CPUs have kept improving they way they have when the brute force way of increasing performance was not as viable as before.
Well we know as fact that a carefully designed system about 5cm wide and 5cm tall can have amazing capacity. Now precisely because CPU speeds are stagnant our architecture is we're way overdue exploring new paths towards this capacity. Although it's hard to tell if it's even achievable in silicon.
Personally I believe digital computation has only a niche applicability in the limit, the degrees of freedom from analog processing are just so much higher, even in the presence of noise.
I think even fewer reader understand that we really, really have very few clues about how the overall data processing of the brain happens.
Indeed, I could even claim that given how little we know, the actual "real processing" happen in the brain wind-up being much less than it seems. But yes, it appears that whatever the brain does is fantabulously more complex than any chip that's even being sketched today.
What this looks like is a chip that does some canned machine learning routines. It seems sad to have to hype a parallel chip of this sort this way. But it would be sad if the chip itself is hard corded for just whatever fake-brain computations its creators thought were right (I've scanned several pages deep for real information on the chip but it comes back hype and more hype). The thing is it's actually possible to build a more general kind of parallel chip - a cellular automaton on chip such as Micro is doing, see: http://www.micron.com/about/innovations/automata-processing.
Also, the Wikipedia page gives the impression this is mostly an exercise in seeing if they can scale chip to neural scale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyNAPSE
I totally agree. Neural networks, and neuromorphic computing/hardware neural networks are fascinating topics, and it's great to see a new interest in them. However, the big issue is that overhype is what caused the lull in neural network research until back propagation (~1986), and then again after that until deep learning (2006).
Thus, while the topics are fascinating and these appear to be impressive strides, journalists need to be careful not to hyperbolize.
