[HN Gopher] Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act L...
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Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 41 points
Date : 2020-10-01 21:49 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| robinduckett wrote:
| At 800 degrees C
| api wrote:
| Can we make AI computers for Venus surface use now?
| mocmoc wrote:
| Of course
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| Protogen wants to know your location.
| Tade0 wrote:
| It's actually still too cold there for them to work.
| astrea wrote:
| Venus seems sufficient:
| https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/681/solar-system-
| temp...
| Judgmentality wrote:
| It's above 800 degrees Fahrenheit, but not even 500
| degrees Celsius.
| [deleted]
| Tade0 wrote:
| This is definitely the "in mice" of materials science.
|
| Solid state batteries, hydrocarbon fuel cells etc. all work -
| at high temperatures.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| This is interesting, but I'm kind of sceptical. We don't fully
| understand everything that's going on in a neuron well enough to
| say if we're replicating that behaviour or not.
|
| We don't even really know how many synapses an average neuron in
| the human brain has.
| indrax wrote:
| I think it's worth considering the hypothesis that neurons work
| because they have been evolving towards memristor like
| behavior.
| [deleted]
| lacker wrote:
| This is really interesting work, but I feel like the way the
| article summarizes it is getting it wrong.
|
| _First Single Device To Act Like a Neuron_
|
| _One thing that's kept engineers from copying the brain's power
| efficiency and quirky computational skill is the lack of an
| electronic device that can, all on its own, act like a neuron. It
| would take a special kind of device to do that, one whose
| behavior is more complex than any yet created._
|
| This is just getting it wrong. Modern neural networks run as
| vectorized operations on a GPU. They are efficient because they
| do _not_ use a single device to act like a single neuron, they
| can do massively parallelized work by optimizing for the hardware
| we have. If we had memristors, it doesn 't seem like GPUs are the
| first thing they'd replace. More likely they would replace some
| sort of memory, since what makes them unique is storing
| information rather than performing analog operations faster.
| quicklyfrozen wrote:
| The brain is still way more efficient and parallel then a GPU
| (e.g. 12W compared to 280W), so being able to duplicate it
| closer sounds like a pretty compelling advancement.
| xyproto wrote:
| To me, this is one the most important news items this year. I've
| been excited about memristors since I first heard about them, and
| this sounds like an excellent application.
|
| These single device "neurons" also hints of things to come. Even
| larger neural nets with more efficient structures may, perhaps,
| cross a threshold in terms of what it can learn and express. I'm
| thinking Alpha Go Zero and beyond.
|
| I believe this is only the start of this type of hardware.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I've heard about memristors for ... a decade? ... so I'm
| skeptical.
|
| What makes "this time different"?
|
| They were going to revolutionize the speed of data access,
| right? https://past.date-conference.com/proceedings-
| archive/2017/pd... Making them behave like neurons is a cool
| hack, but sort of tangential to why anyone cares about
| memristors.
|
| I keep an open mind though, so if this time really is
| different, then that's valid. It just seems like more hype.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I was also very interested in memristors when I first
| discovered them over 10 years ago. I actually wanted to go to
| graduate school to work on them, but was surprisingly unlucky
| in finding willing advisors with funding. In fact I even
| personally knew one of the researchers at HP and asked about
| working there, and he basically told me "you should do
| something else with your life."
|
| > I believe this is only the start of this type of hardware.
|
| I agree, but I also suspect a pragmatic solution is still
| decades away, much like nuclear fusion. Of course I no longer
| follow this area closely and could be completely wrong.
| sroussey wrote:
| For neural networks, it makes sense to skip pure digital design.
|
| When I learned how to design an ALU to say, add, and wait for the
| propagation of carry bits that's like O(n) where n is the number
| of bits in the number, it made me want to just use superposition
| for addition, which is physical and instantaneous. Of course,
| that has all sorts of other problems that make it worse (so much
| worse).
|
| Once you learn how to slow down the earlier bits, you end up with
| all the bits arriving at the same time, and you can have up to n
| adds pipelined and timed to the clock when output matters.
|
| But with NN I think now would be a fun time (and likely the last
| decade as well) to rethink the basics right down to the basics.
| Everything need not be a NAND gate. :)
| morei wrote:
| This runs into the problem that the power efficiency of
| analogue circuitry is dramatically worse. A FET dissipates the
| least heat when it's fully on or fully off. Operating in the
| resistive regime will result in orders of magnitude more
| dissipation.
|
| It's difficult to over-come that, particularly because it's not
| a comparison between 'analogue v 64-bit float', but 'analogue
| versus 8-bit int'. (it's tough for scale analogue circuits to
| operate even when 8-bit accuracy).
| DesiLurker wrote:
| I have followed this on & off. The thing that I got excited about
| was the amount of integration density and how little energy it
| takes to signal. I wonder how this fares on those aspects.
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