Update on Intel’s Neuromorphic Ecosystem Growth and Progress
December 03 2020 - 3:00PM
Business Wire
What’s New: Today, Intel shared an update on progress
within the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC). The group
has grown rapidly since its inception in 2018 and now includes more
than 100 members, with Intel announcing today the addition of
Lenovo, Logitech, Mercedes-Benz and Prophesee to explore the value
of neuromorphic computing for business use cases. Additionally,
Intel summarized a growing body of research results from INRC
members that used the company’s neuromorphic research test chip,
Loihi.
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Intel Labs' Mike Davies, director of the
Neuromorphic Computing Lab, speaks as part of Intel Labs Day. Intel
Labs Day 2020 was presented virtually on Dec. 3, 2020. (Credit:
Intel Corporation)
“In two short years, we’ve formed a vibrant
community comprising hundreds of researchers around the world
inspired by the promise of neuromorphic computing to deliver orders
of magnitude gains in computing efficiency, speed and intelligent
functionality. For the first time, we are seeing a quantitative
picture emerge that validates this promise. Together with our INRC
partners, we plan to build on these insights to enable wide-ranging
disruptive commercial applications for this nascent technology.”
–Mike Davies, director of Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab
Why It Matters: Intel created the INRC because it
believes no one organization alone will effectively unlock the full
potential of neuromorphic computing. By collaborating with some of
the leading researchers in this field spanning academia, industry
and government, Intel is working to overcome the challenges in the
development of neuromorphic computing and to progress it from
research prototypes to industry-leading products over the coming
years.
Intel and its partners have demonstrated orders of magnitude
gains for real-world edge use cases and are seeing early progress
in scaling these workloads to solve larger computational problems.
As neuromorphic computing continues to advance, Intel and the INRC
have also uncovered various potential real-world use cases for
neuromorphic technology, such as enabling more efficient and
adaptive robotics; rapidly searching large databases for similar
content; and allowing edge devices to make difficult planning and
optimization decisions in real time. The addition of Lenovo,
Logitech, Mercedes-Benz and Prophesee to the INRC along with
existing Fortune 500 and government members showcases the steady
maturing of neuromorphic technology and its coming graduation from
academic laboratories into industry applications.
Results: Through ongoing development, prototyping and
testing of applications built on Intel’s neuromorphic systems,
Intel and INRC members are compiling a growing body of results that
show consistent gains across a wide range of workloads. Existing
results, such as mimicking the human olfactory system and bringing
event-based touch sensing to robotics, combined with new benchmarks
outlined at Intel Labs Day, paint a picture of neuromorphic
computing being well-suited for an emerging class of bio-inspired
intelligent workloads that also have commercial relevance.
Benchmarking updates highlighted at Intel Labs Day include:
- Voice command recognition: Accenture tested the ability
to recognize voice commands on Intel’s Loihi chip versus a standard
graphics processing unit (GPU) and found Loihi not only achieved
similar accuracy, it was up to 1,000 times more energy efficient
and responded up to 200 milliseconds faster. Through the INRC,
Mercedes-Benz is exploring how these results could apply to
real-world use cases, such as adding new voice interaction commands
to vehicles.
- Gesture recognition: Traditional artificial intelligence
works well for crunching big data and recognizing patterns across
thousands of examples, but it has a hard time learning subtle
differences that change from person to person – like the gestures
we use to communicate. Accenture and INRC partners are
demonstrating tangible progress for utilizing Loihi’s self-learning
capabilities to quickly learn and recognize individualized
gestures. Processing input from a neuromorphic camera, Loihi can
learn new gestures in just a few exposures. This could be applied
to a variety of use cases, such as interacting with smart products
in the home or touchless displays in public spaces.
- Image retrieval: Researchers from the retail industry
evaluated Loihi for image-based product search applications. They
found Loihi could generate image feature vectors over three times
more energy-efficiently than conventional central processing unit
(CPU) and GPU solutions while maintaining the same level of
accuracy. This work complements similar search results from Intel’s
Pohoiki Springs neuromorphic research system published earlier this
year, which showed Loihi’s ability to search feature vectors in
million-image databases 24 times faster and with 30 times lower
energy than a CPU.
- Optimization and search: Intel and its partners have
discovered that Loihi can solve optimization and search problems
over 1,000 times more efficiently and 100 times faster compared to
traditional CPUs. Optimization problems – such as constraint
satisfaction – provide potential value at the edge, such as
enabling drones to plan and make complex navigation decisions in
real time. The same problem type could also be scaled for complex
data center workloads, assisting with tasks like train scheduling
and logistics optimization.
- Robotics: Rutgers and TU Delft researchers published new
demonstrations of robotic navigation and micro-drone control
applications running on Loihi. TU Delft’s drone performed optic
flow landings with an evolved 35-neuron spiking network running at
frequencies over 250 kilohertz. Rutgers found its Loihi solutions
to require 75 times lower power than conventional mobile GPU
implementations, without any loss in performance. In work published
at the 2020 Conference on Robot Learning in November, Rutgers
researchers found Loihi could successfully learn numerous OpenAI
Gym tasks with equivalent high accuracy as a deep actor network,
with 140 times lower energy consumption compared to a mobile GPU
solution.
Additionally, Intel and partners unveiled two state-of-the-art
neuromorphic robotics demonstrations at Intel Labs Day. Working
with researchers from ETH Zurich, Intel showed Loihi adaptively
controlling a horizon-tracking drone platform achieving closed-loop
speeds up to 20 kilohertz with 200 microseconds of visual
processing latency. This represents a 1,000 times gain in combined
efficiency and speed compared to conventional solutions. Tackling
the neuromorphic software integration problem, Intel and
researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT)
demonstrated the operation of multiple cognitive functions running
together on Loihi in IIT’s iCub robot platform. These included
object recognition with fast, few-shot learning, spatial awareness
from those learned objects and real-time decision-making in
response to human interaction.
What’s Next: As the INRC grows, Intel will continue
investing in this unique ecosystem and working with members to
provide technology support and explore where neuromorphic computing
can add real-world value for problems big and small. Additionally,
Intel is continuing to take learnings from the INRC and incorporate
them into the development of the company’s next-generation
neuromorphic research chip, which will be coming soon.
About the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community: The
Intel Neuromorphic Research Community is an ecosystem of academic
groups, government labs, research institutions and companies around
the world working with Intel to further neuromorphic computing and
develop innovative artificial intelligence applications.
Researchers interested in participating in the INRC and developing
for Loihi can visit the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community
website. A list of current members can also be found at the
site.
More Context: Intel Labs Day (Press Kit) | Neuromorphic
Computing (Press Kit) | Intel Labs (Press Kit) | How Neuromorphic
Computing Uses the Human Brain as a Model (Video)
About Intel
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating
world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches
lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the
design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our
customers’ greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the
cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash
the potential of data to transform business and society for the
better. To learn more about Intel’s innovations, go to
newsroom.intel.com and intel.com.
© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo and other Intel marks
are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other
names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
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Alexa Korkos 1-415-706-5783 alexa.korkos@intel.com
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