Neuromorphic Chips: Using Animal Brains as a Model for Computing

Strong interest in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is driving rapid advances into the basic elements of computers are architected. GPUs are one example -- a GPU consists of a large number of processor cores that can all work in parallel and are tuned to be very performant when operating on very specific kinds problems, like image processing. While originally developed primarily for graphic processing, GPU's are increasingly being used for other computationally intensive problems in machine learning. Our current concept for how a computer works was first conceived by Turing and von Neumann in the 1940's. In the von Neumann model for computing, there is a central processing unit or CPU that uses internal registers for processing data.