Intel's Hala Point, the world's largest neuromorphic computer, has 1.15 billion neurons

Good news! What a marvel!

"Three years after introducing its second-generation "neuromorphic" computer chip, Intel on Wednesday announced the company has assembled 1,152 of the parts into a single, parallel-processing system called Hala Point, in partnership with the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories.

The Hala Point system's 1,152 Loihi 2 chips enable a total of 1.15 billion artificial neurons, Intel said, "and 128 billion synapses distributed over 140,544 neuromorphic processing cores." That is an increase from the previous Intel multi-chip Loihi system, debuted in 2020, called Pohoiki Springs, which used just 768 Loihi 1 chips.

Sandia Labs intends to use the system for what it calls "brain-scale computing research," to solve problems in areas of device physics, computer architecture, computer science, and informatics. ...
Neuromorphic computing is an umbrella term given to a variety of efforts to build computation that resembles some aspect of the way the brain is formed. The term goes back to early 1980s work by legendary computing pioneer Carver Mead, who was interested in how the increasingly dense collections of transistors on a chip could best communicate. Mead's insight was that the wires between transistors would have to achieve some of the efficiency of the brain's neural wiring. ..."

"... About Hala Point: Loihi 2 neuromorphic processors, which form the basis for Hala Point, apply brain-inspired computing principles, such as asynchronous, event-based spiking neural networks (SNNs), integrated memory and computing, and sparse and continuously changing connections to achieve orders-of-magnitude gains in energy consumption and performance. Neurons communicate directly with one another rather than communicating through memory, reducing overall power consumption. ...
Hala Point integrates processing, memory, and communication channels in a massively parallelized fabric, providing a total of 16 petabytes per second (PB/s) of memory bandwidth, 3.5 PB/s of inter-core communication bandwidth, and 5 terabytes per second (TB/s) of inter-chip communication bandwidth. The system can process over 380 trillion 8-bit synapses and over 240 trillion neuron operations per second. ..."

Intel's Hala Point, the world's largest neuromorphic computer, has 1.15 billion neurons | ZDNET The Hala Point machine brings compute efficiency that rivals GPUs and CPUs on some tasks, Intel said.

Intel Builds World’s Largest Neuromorphic System to Enable More Sustainable AI Hala Point, the industry’s first 1.15 billion neuron neuromorphic system, builds a path toward more efficient and scalable AI.

A human brain is still much smaller and can do more and much more energy efficient! 😊