Super Energy-Efficient Computers Through Brain-Like Chips

Scientist Sees Super Energy-Efficient Computers Through Brain-Like Chips.

Discover (11/6, Fox) reported on its website that Ghana-born Kwabena Boahen, "a prominent scientist at Stanford University in California," is "working to create a computer...based not on the regimented order of traditional silicon chips but on the organized chaos of the human brain," and "designing this machine will mean rejecting everything that we have learned over the past 50 years about building computers." The human brain "runs on only about 20 watts of power, equal to the dim light behind the pickle jar in your refrigerator. By contrast, the computer on your desk consumes a million times as much energy per calculation. If you wanted to build a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain, it would require 10 to 20 megawatts of electricity." Getting there, Boahen has come to realize, "will require rethinking the fundamental balance between energy, information, and noise."