Engr. Sayed Mazhar Ali Shah
Intel is the world’s largest technology company 7th in ranking. Intel supplies microprocessors for the most manufacturers of computer systems. It also manufactures chipsets, network interface controllers, flash memory, and graphics processing units, FPGA, and other communications and computing related devices. Intel has created world-changing technology that improves the life of every person on the planet. Intel is applying resources to enable the world more fully on the power of digital technology. Intel has developed the world’s largest neuromorphic computer that will be able to run more sophisticated AI models than on conventional computers. A neuromorphic compute is a device intended to mimic the operation of the human brain. Neuromorphic computers are different from the traditional machines, because traditional computers uses its processors to perform operations and store data in spate memory, while a neuromorphic device uses artificial neurons to both store and compute, just as our brains do. Intel claiming its new Hala Point neuromorphic computer brings greater energy efficiency as it uses 100 times less energy than traditional machines when running optimization problems, which involve finding the best solution to a problem given certain constraints. It may be also open the new ways to train and run AI models that uses chain of neurons, as real brain process information, rather than current models mechanically passing input through each and every layer of artificial neurons. According to Intel, the new system can do up to 20 quadrillion operations per second (20 petaops), with an efficiency more than 15 trillion 8-bit operations per second per watt (TOPS/W). The hardware comprises of 1,152 Loihi 2 processors packed in a six-rack-unit chassis that is little bigger than a microwave. In addition to the previously stated 1.15 billion neurons, the technological specifications include 128 billion synapses and 140,544 neuromorphic processing cores. The maximum power consumption of the Intel Hala Point is 2,600 W.There are also over 2,300 embedded x86 processors utilized for auxiliary computations, although the exact number has not been released. The overall memory bandwidth is 16 petabytes per second (PB/s), including 3.5 PB/s of inter-core data transfer and 5 TB/s of inter-core bandwidth.Existing machine never close to the scale of Hala Point, although a super computer called DeepSouth will be capable of a claimed 228 trillion synaptic operations in one second. Intel claims that a machine like Hala Point could create AI models that learn continuously rather than needing to be trained from scratch to learn each new task, as in current models. Hala Point is advanced AI hardware will be used to solve various scientific problems, including computer architecture-related, device physics, computer science, informatics, and much more. Hope for best that Hala Point gives a new life in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning to power up the digital technology.
