IBM delivers a piece of its brain-inspired supercomputer to Livermore national lab

IBM is about to deliver the foundation of a brain-inspired supercomputer to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the federal government's top research institutions. The delivery is one small "blade" within a server rack with 16 chips, dubbed TrueNorth, and is modeled after the way the human brain functions. Silicon Valley is awash in optimism about artificial intelligence, largely based on the progress that deep learning neural networks are making in solving big problems. Companies from Google to Nvidia are hoping they'll provide the AI smarts for self-driving cars and other tough problems. It is within this environment that IBM has been pursuing solutions in brain-inspired supercomputers. The main benefit is that such chips may be able to operate at lower frequencies and get much more work done on a much smaller amount of power.