Intel Breakthrough Neuromorphic Human Brain Inspired System | NextBigFuture.com

Today, Intel has built the world’s largest neuromorphic system. It is code-named Hala Point, this large-scale neuromorphic system, initially deployed at Sandia National Laboratories, utilizes Intel’s Loihi 2 processor. It is aimed at supporting research for future brain-inspired artificial intelligence (AI), and tackles challenges related to the efficiency and sustainability of today’s AI. Hala Point advances Intel’s first-generation large-scale research system, Pohoiki Springs, with architectural improvements to achieve over 10 times more neuron capacity and up to 12 times higher performance.

Hala Point supports up to 20 quadrillion operations per second, or 20 petaops, with an efficiency exceeding 15 trillion 8-bit operations per second per watt (TOPS/W) when executing conventional deep neural networks. This rivals and exceeds levels achieved by architectures built on graphics processing units (GPU) and central processing units (CPU). Hala Point’s unique capabilities could enable future real-time continuous learning for AI applications such as scientific and engineering problem-solving, logistics, smart city infrastructure management, large language models (LLMs) and AI agents.

Hala Point packages 1,152 Loihi 2 processors produced on Intel 3 process node in a six-rack-unit data center chassis the size of a microwave oven. The system supports up to 1.15 billion neurons and 128 billion synapses distributed over 140,544 neuromorphic processing cores, consuming a maximum of 2,600 watts of power. It also includes over 2,300 embedded x86 processors for ancillary computations.

Hala Point integrates processing, memory and communication channels in a massively parallelized fabric, providing a total of 16 petabytes per second (PB/s) of memory bandwidth, 3.5 PB/s of inter-core communication bandwidth, and 5 terabytes per second (TB/s) of inter-chip communication bandwidth.

Applied to bio-inspired spiking neural network models, the system can execute its full capacity of 1.15 billion neurons 20 times faster than a human brain and up to 200 times faster rates at lower capacity. While Hala Point is not intended for neuroscience modeling, its neuron capacity is roughly equivalent to that of an owl brain or the cortex of a capuchin monkey.

Loihi-based systems can perform AI inference and solve optimization problems using 100 times less energy at speeds as much as 50 times faster than conventional CPU and GPU architectures