Intel’s Pohoiki Beach, a 64-Chip Neuromorphic System, Delivers Breakthrough Results in Research Tests
July 15 2019 - 9:30AM
Business Wire
What’s New: Today, Intel announced that an 8
million-neuron neuromorphic system comprising 64 Loihi research
chips — codenamed Pohoiki Beach — is now available to the broader
research community. With Pohoiki Beach, researchers can experiment
with Intel’s brain-inspired research chip, Loihi, which applies the
principles found in biological brains to computer architectures.
Loihi enables users to process information up to 1,000 times faster
and 10,000 times more efficiently than CPUs for specialized
applications like sparse coding, graph search and
constraint-satisfaction problems.
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Rich Uhlig, managing director of Intel
Labs, holds one of Intel’s Nahuku boards, each of which contains 8
to 32 Intel Loihi neuromorphic chips. Intel’s latest neuromorphic
system, Pohoiki Beach, is made up of multiple Nahuku boards and
contains 64 Loihi chips. Pohoiki Beach was introduced in July 2019.
(Credit: Tim Herman/Intel Corporation)
“We are impressed with the early results demonstrated as we
scale Loihi to create more powerful neuromorphic systems. Pohoiki
Beach will now be available to more than 60 ecosystem partners, who
will use this specialized system to solve complex,
compute-intensive problems.”
-- Rich Uhlig, managing director of Intel Labs
Why It’s Important: With the introduction of Pohoiki
Beach, researchers can now efficiently scale up novel
neural-inspired algorithms — such as sparse coding, simultaneous
localization and mapping (SLAM), and path planning — that can learn
and adapt based on data inputs. Pohoiki Beach represents a major
milestone in Intel’s neuromorphic research, laying the foundation
for Intel Labs to scale the architecture to 100 million neurons
later this year.
Why It’s Different: Continuing the gains in power and
performance enabled by Moore’s Law will require more than continued
process-node scaling. As new complex computing workloads become the
norm, there is a growing need for specialized architectures
designed for specific applications.
The Pohoiki Beach neuromorphic system demonstrates the benefits
of a specialized architecture for emerging applications, including
some of the computational problems hardest for the internet of
things (IoT) and autonomous devices to support. By using this type
of specialized system, as opposed to general-purpose computing
technologies, we can expect to realize orders of magnitude gains in
speed and efficiency for a range of real-world applications, from
autonomous vehicles to smart homes to cybersecurity.
What Our Research Partners are Saying: With the
introduction of Pohoiki Beach, Intel will allow ecosystem partners
worldwide to continue to pioneer the next frontier of
neural-inspired algorithmic research.
At the Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop
this week, for example, researchers are using Loihi systems to
solve challenges at the cutting edge of neuromorphic engineering.
Projects include providing adaptation capabilities to the AMPRO
prosthetic leg, object tracking using emerging event-based cameras,
automating a foosball table with neuromorphic sensing and control,
learning to control a linear inverted pendulum, and inferring
tactile input to the electronic skin of an iCub robot.
In addition to the work coming out of Telluride, other research
partners are already seeing the benefits of Loihi at scale:
"With the Loihi chip we've been able to demonstrate 109 times
lower power consumption running a real-time deep learning benchmark
compared to a GPU, and 5 times lower power consumption compared to
specialized IoT inference hardware,” said Chris Eliasmith, co-CEO
of Applied Brain Research and professor at University of Waterloo.
“Even better, as we scale the network up by 50 times, Loihi
maintains real-time performance results and uses only 30 percent
more power, whereas the IoT hardware uses 500 percent more power
and is no longer real-time.”
“Loihi allowed us to realize a spiking neural network that
imitates the brain’s underlying neural representations and
behavior. The SLAM solution emerged as a property of the network’s
structure. We benchmarked the Loihi-run network and found it to be
equally accurate while consuming 100 times less energy than a
widely used CPU-run SLAM method for mobile robots,” professor
Konstantinos Michmizos of Rutgers University said while describing
his lab’s work on SLAM to be presented at the International
Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in
November.
What’s Next: In 2017, Intel introduced Loihi, its first
neuromorphic research chip, taking a major step forward in the
development of neuromorphic hardware. In March 2018, the company
established the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC) to
further the development of neuromorphic algorithms, software and
applications. Through INRC, Intel provides access to its Loihi
cloud systems and Kapoho Bay, a Loihi-based USB form factor system,
which has invigorated research on real-world applications for
neuromorphic technologies.
Today’s announcement of Pohoiki Beach accelerates this effort by
providing greater computational scale and capacity to Intel’s
research partners.
Later this year, Intel will introduce an even larger Loihi
system named Pohoiki Springs, which will build on the Pohoiki Beach
architecture to deliver an unprecedented level of performance and
efficiency for scaled-up neuromorphic workloads.
Intel’s engineers expect that measurements from these research
systems will quantify the gains that are achievable with
neuromorphic-computing methods and will clarify the application
areas most suitable for the technology. This research paves the way
for the eventual commercialization of neuromorphic technology.
More Context: Intel Labs (Press Kit)
About Intel
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), a leader in the semiconductor industry, is
shaping the data-centric future with computing and communications
technology that is the foundation of the world’s innovations. The
company’s engineering expertise is helping address the world’s
greatest challenges as well as helping secure, power and connect
billions of devices and the infrastructure of the smart, connected
world – from the cloud to the network to the edge and everything in
between. Find more information about Intel at newsroom.intel.com
and intel.com.
Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in
the United States and other countries.
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Alexa Korkos 415-706-5783 alexa.korkos@intel.com
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