Using Smartphone Chips to Build a Brain

Image: Yaca2671

 

Could enough smartphone chips mimic the power of the human brain? Steve Furber, a well-known computer engineer, thinks so. In fact, he’s already working on building a 1-billion-neuron synthetic brain at a Taiwanese microchip plant.

Made up of about 50,000 widely-available chips that are usually used in e-book readers and smartphones, Spinnaker is Furber’s attempt to create an affordable, practical and low-power way to copy the compact power of human brains. Industry experts are skeptical; previous attempts hint that the brain is simply too complex to accurately mimic.