Remember when cellphones looked like this?
You could call, text, maybe play snake on
it … and it had about 6 megabytes of memory,
which was a small miracle at the time.
Then, phones got faster and around every two
years, you probably upgraded your phone from
8 gigs to 16 to 32 and so on and so forth.
This incremental technological progress we’ve
all been participating in for years hinges
on one key trend, called Moore’s Law.
Co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore made a prediction
in 1965 that integrated circuits, or chips,
were the path to cheaper electronics.
Moore’s law states that the number of transistors,
the tiny switches that control the flow of
an electrical current that can fit in an integrated
circuit, will double every two years, while
the cost will halve.
Chip power goes up as cost goes down.
That exponential growth has brought massive
advances in computing power… hence tiny
computers in our pockets!
A single chip today can contain billions of
transistors, and each transistor is about
14 nanometres across!
That’s smaller than most human viruses!
Now, Moore’s law isn’t a law of physics,
it’s just a good hunch that’s driven companies
to make better chips.
But experts are claiming that this trend is
slowing down.
Granddaddy chip maker Intel recently disclosed
that it's becoming more difficult to roll
out smaller transistors in a two year timeframe
while also being affordable.
So, to power the next wave of electronics,
there are a few promising options in the works.
One is quantum computing.
Another currently in the lab stage is neuromorphic
computing, which are computer chips that are
modeled after our own brains!
They’re basically capable of learning and
remembering all at the same time at an incredibly
fast clip.
Let’s break that down and start with the
human brain.
So, your brain has billions of neurons, each
of which forms synapses or connections with
other neurons.
Synaptic activity relies on ion channels,
which control the flow of charged atoms like
sodium and calcium that make your brain function
and process properly.
So, a neuromorphic chip copies that model
by relying on a densely connected web of transistors
that mimic the activity of ion channels.
Each chip has a network of cores, with inputs
and outputs that are wired to additional cores,
which all operate in conjunction with each
other.
Because of this connectivity, neuromorphic
chips are able to integrate memory, computation,
and communication all together.
These chips are an entirely new computational
design.
Standard chips today are built based on von
Neumann architecture... where the processor
and memory are separate and the data moves
between them.
A central processing unit runs commands that
are fetched from memory to execute tasks.
This is what’s made computers very good
at computing, but not as efficiently as they
could be.
Neuromorphic chips however completely change
that model by having both storage and processing
connected within these “neurons” that
are all communicating and learning together.
The hope is that these neuromorphic chips
could transform computers from general purpose
calculators into machines that can learn from
experience and make decisions.
We'd leap to a future where computers wouldn't
just be able to crunch data at break neck
speeds but could do that AND process sensory
data in real time.
Some future applications of neuromorphic chips
might include combat robots that could decide
how to act in the field, drones that could
detect changes in the environment, and your
car taking you to a drive through for ice
cream after being dumped… basically these
chips could power our future robot overlords.
We don't have machines with sophisticated,
brain-like chips yet but they’re on the
horizon.
So get ready for a whole new meaning for the
term “brain power.”
But we have something less frightening than
AI to share with you... did you know we have
a sister channel called Seeker VR?
It’s everything you love about Seeker, but
in 360 degrees!
SeekerVR will take you on some incredible
journeys that you probably wouldn’t get
to experience otherwise.
Like in a recent episode, we took a ride on
one of the most deadly trains in the world.
Check it out here.
Want to learn more about how the fastest computers
in the world work?
We’ve got a video about them here.
And am I the only one who misses my Motorola
Razr?
Let us know in the comments and check back
here for more videos.
