Dubbed Pohoiki Springs, the new system based on Intel Labs’ “Loihi” neuromorphic processor is expected to be available to the research community soon. It will contain up to 768 Loihi chips, totalling 100 million neurons. Introduced in November 2017, Loihi is Intel’s fifth and most complex chip in a family of different neuromorphic devices, and its architecture is optimized for Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). Compared to ‘regular’ Artificial Neural Networks, SNNs can be considered more ‘similar’ to biological neural networks in that they incorporate time as an explicit dependency in computations, and their neurons will fire (produce a spike) only when certain parameters reach a specific threshold. In the outgoing ‘spike train’, information is represented by the frequency of spikes or the timing between them. SNNs promise great benefits over ‘regular’ ANNs in terms of performance and power consumption. Among the reasons currently preventing a wider adoption of SNNs in practical AI applications is that conventional processing architectures – such as CPUs and GPUs – are not ideally suited to implement these networks. Hence, the need for SNN-specialized architectures such as the Loihi chip.

The Loihi chip. Image credit: Intel