Mihai Raneti has announced NPU One, described as a major step toward the first artificial brain, six years into a venture-funded project.
The processor works as part of an ecosystem called the Swarm Nervous System, which at this point includes a development kit, a security solution, a true random number generator and the software around them.
The starting point was architectural. “It all started from one particular problem,” Raneti says, “to do with the structure of the von Neumann architecture,” the processor, memory and storage arrangement almost every computer is built on. The company set out to find an alternative to it.
The approach is hybrid, mixing analogue and digital and putting what amounts to a small brain onto a chip. Memristors are turned into artificial neurons with machine learning built into them.
The result is a system that can learn, relearn and recognise on an insignificant amount of energy, and a chip whose security sits in the hardware rather than in software running on top of it, which is what makes it resistant to attack.