https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16365390/intel-investigates-chips-designed-like-your-brain-to-turn-the-ai-tide

In the race to build better hardware for artificial intelligence, Intel is turning to an old, but unproven, type of computer processor. Neuromorphic chips, as they’re known, are modeled after the human brain, but after decades of research, have yet to show better performance in real-life applications than regular CPUs and GPUs. The veteran chipmaker wants to change that, unveiling a new neuromorphic chip this week designed specifically for R&D that the company has christened “Loihi.”

Like all neuromorphic chips, Loihi uses what researchers call “spiking neurons” as its basic computational building block. These neurons replace the traditional logic gates found in today’s silicon, and instead of processing information as binary 1s and 0s, they weight the signals they send, making their functionality more analog than binary. And, unlike CPUs, these neurons aren’t controlled by a central “clock” that regulates their calculations in a tick-tock fashion, but can instead fire as and when needed.