The interesting thing about this project is that they're using transistors to physically simulate synapses and neurons, which is quite an inefficient method. Transistors are expensive, and your brain has about 100 billion neurons, and trillions of synapses.
A recent discovery by Leon Chua has shown that synapses and neurons can be directly replicated using Memristors [1]. Memristors are passive devices which may be much simpler to build in the scale of neurons compared to transistors.
Actually this chip is not _that_ far off. It has 5 billion transistors so with a process shrink and a board with 10-20 of these chips it should be roughly equivalent to the number of neurons in a human brain. Now think of your home with about 100 of things connected to your network and your house will be pretty darn smart!
You are quite off here. A transistor is simply not as powerful as a neuron. The article itself notes that the chip is capable of simulating "just over one million \"neurons,\"".
Comments
The interesting thing about this project is that they're using transistors to physically simulate synapses and neurons, which is quite an inefficient method. Transistors are expensive, and your brain has about 100 billion neurons, and trillions of synapses.
A recent discovery by Leon Chua has shown that synapses and neurons can be directly replicated using Memristors [1]. Memristors are passive devices which may be much simpler to build in the scale of neurons compared to transistors.
1. http://iopscience.iop.org/0022-3727/46/9/093001/
Actually this chip is not _that_ far off. It has 5 billion transistors so with a process shrink and a board with 10-20 of these chips it should be roughly equivalent to the number of neurons in a human brain. Now think of your home with about 100 of things connected to your network and your house will be pretty darn smart!
You are quite off here. A transistor is simply not as powerful as a neuron. The article itself notes that the chip is capable of simulating "just over one million \"neurons,\"".