Intel debuts Pohoiki Springs, a powerful neuromorphic research system for AI workloads

This morning, Intel announced the general readiness of Pohoiki Springs, a powerful self-contained neuromorphic system that's about the size of five standard servers. The company says the system will be available to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community via the cloud using Intel's Nx SDK and community-contributed software components, giving them a tool to scale up their neuromorphic research and explore ways to accelerate workloads that run slowly on today's conventional architectures. Intel claims Pohoiki Springs, which was announced in July 2019, is similar in neural capacity to the brain of a small mammal, with 768 Loihi chips and 100 million neurons spread across 24 Arria10 FPGA Nahuku expansion boards (containing 32 chips each) that operate at under 500 watts. This is ostensibly a step on the path to supporting larger and more sophisticated neuromorphic workloads. In fact, just this week, Intel demonstrated that the chips can be used to "teach" an AI model to distinguish among 10 different scents. "Pohoiki Springs enables our research partners to explore ways to accelerate workloads that run slowly today on conventional architectures, including high-performance computing systems," said Intel neuromorphic compute lab director Mike Davies in a statement.