Sandia: Brain-like neurochips chips useful in supercomputers

Neuromorphic chips that mimic the way brains work may have broad applicability for high-performance computing applications and could be a better fit than CPUs and GPUs in some cases, according to Sandia National Laboratories in the US. Neuromorphic computing represents a fundamental change in the way data is processed and analyzed. Up until now, artificial intelligence has been promoted as the main use case, although IBM, which was far ahead of the commercially viable brain-inspired game with its True North devices once saw much broader applicability. Intel, for instance, positions its Loihi neurochips as the future of AI computing but as Sandia researchers demonstrated in a recent article in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Electronics, Intel's Loihi chips "can solve more complex problems than those posed by artificial intelligence and may even earn a place in high-performance computing." This includes problems like tracking X-rays passing through bone and soft tissue, data flows within social networks, financial market movements and disease spread within a population, among other things.