Samsung tus IBM's brain-like chip into a digital eye - CNET

The result is a camera that can keep track of what's going on at a remarkable 2,000 frames of video per second. Ordinary digital cameras typically max out at 120fps. That speed is useful for creating 3D maps, safety features on self-driving cars and new forms of remote controls that recognize gestures.

Samsung's TrueNorth-based system is very efficient, consuming about 300 milliwatts of power, Ryu said. That's about a hundredth of a laptop processor and a tenth of a phone processor. By comparison, the brain can handle some tasks with 100 million times less power than a computer, though, he said.

"There is a huge gap between biology and mode silicon technology," Ryu said.

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Samsung demonstrated the chip recognizing hand gestures so a person could control a TV. It recognized hand waves, finger waves, closed fists and finger pinches from about 10 feet away.

Because the chips run cool, Samsung expects to be able to stack them together into bigger groups. IBM already gangs them together into 16-chip packages that come closer to matching the scale of the roughly 86 billion neurons in a human brain.

IBM is trying to get partners to explore what's possible with TrueNorth. Other researchers noodling with TrueNorth spoke at the IBM event.

One is the Air Force Research Laboratory, which is investigating TrueNorth for use in identifying unusual events in video, detecting computer attacks, tuing printed text or audio into searchable data and summarizing it, and giving drones autonomy when in flight but not connected to a human controller at a distant military base.