Modelling the Human Brain with specialised CPUs
Sunday, July 30, 2023 at 8:38PM Part 2: University of Manchester's Professor Steve Furber discusses the design considerations for developing hardware to mimic the workings of the human brain.
The designed hardware, the Arm-based Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNAker) chip, is being used to understand the working of the brain and for industrial applications to implement artificial intelligence (AI)
Professor Steve Furber
Steve Furber has spent his career researching computing systems but his interests have taken him on a path different to the mainstream.
As principal designer at Acorn Computers, he developed a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processor architecture when microprocessors used a complex instruction set.
The RISC design became the foundational architecture for the processor design company Arm.
As an academic, Furber explored asynchronous logic when the digital logic of commercial chips was all clock-driven.
He then took a turn towards AI during a period when AI research was in the doldrums.
