Today, IBM researchers opened the eyes of the world to a possible new future. In the heart of all computers lives a processor which acts as the brain. It is served information from a storage device, analyses said data based on coded algorithms and organizes it into a medium that is accessible to the casual user. Without a processor, a computer could still understand itself. Ones and zeroes are the basic framework for everything, and that language of ones (on) and zeroes (off) builds the internal environment of our technology. However, it would be a simple environment and without a processor acting as the front man for your experience, a computer would be highly unintelligible and lack the basic problem solving abilities we have come to rely on. Because pure data is not accessible without some sort of conversion, processor technology is of incredible importance. One of the main drawbacks of our current system, is that information and processing are not bound together. In the human brain, neurons and synapses act as both units of processing and units of data. Because data is not being fed into the processor of the brain, but is stored contiguously, data can be analyzed non-linearly and we can experience the world in real-time. This means, all data that corresponds to a certain, lets say... picture of a cat, would engage at the same time without bottlenecking in the connection between the processor and the storage device. Usually, a photo will load linearly, one piece of data coming through the pipeline at a time to be analyzed individually by the processor. Piece by piece the photo is put together. This new technology from IBM reimagines the way information is processed. Like our brains, data and processing are in the same place, so when when a computer using this technology is accessed and imposed upon to calculate say... how many cars are passing through an intersection, or to load a picture, that imposition requires no corollary connection to a storage device, and the entire processor activates in every area that is pertinent to whatever action it is trying to achieve. In this way, one of the only bottlenecks is between the unintelligible information being analyzed and the conversion of that data into something we can recognize as users. To put this in context, IBM ran an experiment where their new chips were pitted against the best of the best market available processors. The new chips were not only 100 times faster than the widely available ones, but consumed 100,000 times less electricity. A Budding revelation?
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 23:29:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015