Intel Reveals 4nm Loihi 2 Neuromorphic Research Chip

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Intel unveils its first Intel 4 EUV chip.

The brain is perhaps nature's most complex and perfect invention. To mimic it in silicon, Intel will use its next-generation Intel 4 technology that relies on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, the most sophisticated technology for chip manufacturing invented by humanity, to create the Loihi 2 processor. 

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) software and hardware largely uses offline training and requires significant amounts of power, yet cannot learn on the fly. Neuromorphic computing architectures promise to address power consumption and enable new features such as automatic abstraction, fast generalization, and on-the-fly learning, something that general-purpose or parallel computing architectures cannot provide within reasonable power budgets. Loihi is Intel's series of neuromorphic processors designed to mimic a brain. 

The original Loihi was announced in 2018, it was made using the proven 14nm node and featured 128,000 neurons and synapses. With its successor, Intel goes a lot further. 

The new Loihi 2 chip integrates up to 1 million neurons that can provide up to 10 times faster processing than the original Loihi. The Loihi 2 not only brings in higher performance but also features a considerably more flexible architecture, which will open doors to new types of neuromorphic applications.

The Loihi 2 uses fully programmable neurons that can be allocated up to 4096 states depending on the model (up from 24) and organizes them into 128 neuromorphic cores connected by a network-on-chip (NoC) that enables communication in the form of spike messages. Each core has its own 192KB of SRAM (i.e., about 25MB of SRAM) with programmable partitioning to further improve flexibility and programmability of the processor as well as improve utilization of core memory. 

Further enhancements of the Loihi 2 architecture include support for three-factor learning rules and better synaptic (internal interconnections) compression to enable faster internal data exchange. It is also noteworthy that Loihi 2 has parallel off-chip interfaces (that support the same types of compression as internal synapses) that can be used to extend an on-chip mesh network across multiple physical chips to build an extremely capable neuromorphic computer system.  Meanwhile, to simplify the integration of Loihi 2 into conventional systems, the chip has 10GbE, GPIO, and SPI interfaces. 
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