Samsung continues to prove that it’s much more than a simple smartphone manufacturer. In an effort to continue its innovative endeavors, the South Korean tech giant revealed a fully-fledged digital eye earlier today. Powered by IBM’s TrueNorth processor and designed to work like a human brain, Samsung integrated its latest tech prototype into a smart TV. So, what happens when you give TV eyes? Well of course – it starts seeing.
More specifically, the TV Samsung showcased recognizes hand and finger gestures up to 10 feet away. It’s powered by Samsung’s experimental version of the Dynamic Vision Sensor which relies on IBM’s TrueNorth processor to accurately recognize and interpret various motions. The said chip isn’t built like a traditional CPU though as it features 4,096 computational cores which are interlinked by around 256 million connections. Each core is responsible for sending just a short message to another core in an effort to streamline the act of processing data. It’s obviously not an exact replica of the human brain, but structurally speaking, it’s similar.
Apart from being able to efficiently process huge amounts of data, IBM’s bleeding-edge tech also uses significantly less power than traditional processors. More specifically, the sensor which Samsung integrated into its aforementioned TV consumes no more than 300 milliwatts, which is about 10% of what the average CPU in a modern smartphone requires. So, with the help of IBM’s TrueNorth chip, Samsung’s Dynamic Vision Sensor analyzes each individual camera pixel 2,000 times per second in order to accurately detect movement in a 3D space.
Samsung claims this technology has a wide range of potential applications and has named self-driving cars as the next logical step for digital eyes to take. Due to the fact that it’s rather energy efficient, the TrueNorth chip and its applications could soon even prove to be a viable computational solution for hardware that isn’t considered particularly powerful. In other words, it could potentially revolutionize the Internet of Things industry, something IBM has already experimented with in the past. Its greatest IoT-related accomplishment in recent months was the AI platform Watson which successfully powered a plethora of IoT services in an automated mini bus.