Group items tagged

Back in 2008, IBM announced their plan to try and create a computer that more accurately imitated the computing process of the human brain. Now, with a little help from 4 research Universities and DARPA, they’ve produced prototypes of the first few chips and are on the way to building their first, full-fledged robo-brain. If you’re going to run for the hills, now would be a good time to start. The project’s goal is to drastically alter the way in which computers compute by changing their structure to mimic the human brain instead of functioning as calculators. You see, most computers are von Neumann machines, meaning that the memory and processor are separated. The practical result of this is that as you reach the limit of how fast information can be passed from the memory to the processor via the bus, you reach the limit of computing power. In the human brain, the memory and the processors are in thousands of nodes that communicate slower, but simultaneously and radially. IBM’s prototypes are chips that, in quantity, can emulate those nodes.

Back in 2008, IBM announced their plan to try and create a computer that more accurately imitated the computing process of the human brain. Now, with a little help from 4 research Universities and DARPA, they’ve produced prototypes of the first few chips and are on the way to building their first, full-fledged robo-brain. If you’re going to run for the hills, now would be a good time to start. The project’s goal is to drastically alter the way in which computers compute by changing their structure to mimic the human brain instead of functioning as calculators. You see, most computers are von Neumann machines, meaning that the memory and processor are separated. The practical result of this is that as you reach the limit of how fast information can be passed from the memory to the processor via the bus, you reach the limit of computing power. In the human brain, the memory and the processors are in thousands of nodes that communicate slower, but simultaneously and radially. IBM’s prototypes are chips that, in quantity, can emulate those nodes.

PC-compatible industrial computers are increasing in computing power at a rapid rate due to the availability of multi-core microprocessor chips, and Microsoft Windows has become the de-facto software platform for implementing human-machine interfaces (HMIs). PCs are also becoming more reliable. With these trends, the practice of building robotic systems as complex multi-architecture, multi-platform systems is being challenged. It is now becoming possible to integrate all the functions of machine control and HMI into a single platform, without sacrificing performance and reliability of processing. Through new developments in software, we are seeing industrial systems evolving to better integrate Windows with real-time functionality such as machine vision and motion control. Software support to simplify motion control algorithm implementation already exists for the Intel processor architecture.