Intel Builds World’s Largest Neuromorphic System to Enable More Sustainable AI - Seite 3

Hala Point packages 1,152 Loihi 2 processors produced on Intel 4 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. The system can process over 380 trillion 8-bit synapses and over 240 trillion neuron operations per second.

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 architectures¹. By exploiting up to 10:1 sparse connectivity and event-driven activity, early results on Hala Point show the system can achieve deep neural network efficiencies as high as 15 TOPS/W² without requiring input data to be collected into batches, a common optimization for GPUs that significantly delays the processing of data arriving in real-time, such as video from cameras. While still in research, future neuromorphic LLMs capable of continuous learning could result in gigawatt-hours of energy savings by eliminating the need for periodic re-training with ever-growing datasets.

What’s Next: The delivery of Hala Point to Sandia National Labs marks the first deployment of a new family of large-scale neuromorphic research systems that Intel plans to share with its research collaborators. Further development will enable neuromorphic computing applications to overcome power and latency constraints that limit AI capabilities' real-world, real-time deployment.

Together with an ecosystem of more than 200 Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC) members, including leading academic groups, government labs, research institutions and companies worldwide, Intel is working to push the boundaries of brain-inspired AI and progressing this technology from research prototypes to industry-leading commercial products over the coming years.