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I agree that neuromorphic is often specious, but it's not fair to say that neuromorphic hardware fails if it can do non brain like computations more efficiently

by emcq 11y ago

I agree that neuromorphic is often specious, but it's not fair to say that neuromorphic hardware fails if it can do non brain like computations more efficiently than conventional hardware. The thesis may be misguided at times but building non-traditional hardware that provide significant efficiencies is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it takes a random vector to get off a local maximum. For example, did you know Synaptics, the guys who developed the touch input you're probably using started as a crazy neuromorphic thing from Carver Mead? [0] While most of the IBM press is garbage, they do seem to be making progress running conventional DNNs on their hardware, showing backprop in low precision, and suggesting progress on CNNs. [1,2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead#Touch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead#Touch [1] https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5862-backpropagation-for-energy-efficient-neuromorphic-computing https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5862-backpropagation-for-energy... [2] http://p9.hostingprod.com/@modha.org/blog/2015/12/nips_2015_backpropagation_for_1.html http://p9.hostingprod.com/@modha.org/blog/2015/12/nips_2015_...

modeless 11y ago
This is off topic, but Synaptics touchpad drivers have been the worst part of using a Windows laptop for years and years. Microsoft finally had to take matters into their own hands and write touchpad drivers themselves in Windows 10 because Synaptics just couldn't do it right. Back on topic, that paper is pretty interesting, though MNIST is a toy problem. If they could run any of the ILSVRC winners then I would be impressed, but I can't help but think that if one wants to run CNNs one would be much better off designing a CNN chip to begin with rather than a wacky spiking architecture and trying to shoehorn a CNN into it. To my knowledge nobody has yet fabricated an ASIC specifically for CNNs so there's no way to fairly compare their approach to something like that.
- emcq 11y ago
  Both good points. Yann LeCun (et al) have developed CNN FPGA designs where they project future ASIC performance, but I'm not aware that this has ever been taped out, nor any power numbers released: http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/farabet-iscas-10.pdf http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/farabet-iscas-10.pdf IBM has been working on these chips from 2009 I think, before DNNs really became popular again and I bet they would change a few things if they were designing from scratch today - especially better support for CNNs. The cost of chip production for something like True North is very high (5.4B transistors!) so I suspect they are trying to squeeze as much out of it as they can :)

by emcq 11y ago

modeless 11y ago

This is off topic, but Synaptics touchpad drivers have been the worst part of using a Windows laptop for years and years. Microsoft finally had to take matters into their own hands and write touchpad drivers themselves in Windows 10 because Synaptics just couldn't do it right. Back on topic, that paper is pretty interesting, though MNIST is a toy problem. If they could run any of the ILSVRC winners then I would be impressed, but I can't help but think that if one wants to run CNNs one would be much better off designing a CNN chip to begin with rather than a wacky spiking architecture and trying to shoehorn a CNN into it. To my knowledge nobody has yet fabricated an ASIC specifically for CNNs so there's no way to fairly compare their approach to something like that.

emcq 11y ago
Both good points. Yann LeCun (et al) have developed CNN FPGA designs where they project future ASIC performance, but I'm not aware that this has ever been taped out, nor any power numbers released: http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/farabet-iscas-10.pdf http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/farabet-iscas-10.pdf IBM has been working on these chips from 2009 I think, before DNNs really became popular again and I bet they would change a few things if they were designing from scratch today - especially better support for CNNs. The cost of chip production for something like True North is very high (5.4B transistors!) so I suspect they are trying to squeeze as much out of it as they can :)