Intel Announces Loihi 2, Lava Software Framework For Advancing Neuromorphic Computing

Intel has some new announcements around their neuromorphic computing research.

Intel has announced Loihi 2 as their second-generation neuromorphic research chip. Loihi 2 offers greater density, much better energy efficiency, and other improvements over their original research chip. This is part of the effort to design chips that are more akin to a biologic brain and could lead to big breakthroughs around computing performance and efficiency.

In addition to the Loihi 2 research chip, Intel is also creating an open-source software framework called Lava focused on research and development around neuromorphic computing for AI, robotics, and more. Intel's hope is Lava will become a common software framework in this area.

Intel's announcement going out this morning sums up Lava as, "Lava will allow researchers and application developers to build on each other’s progress and converge on a common set of tools, methods, and libraries. Lava runs seamlessly on heterogeneous architectures across conventional and neuromorphic processors, enabling cross-platform execution and interoperability with a variety of Artificial Intelligence, neuromorphic and robotics frameworks. Developers can begin building neuromorphic applications without access to specialized neuromorphic hardware and can contribute to the Lava code base, including porting it to run on other platforms."

Lava will be available as open-source on GitHub under BSD-3 and LGPLv2.1 licensing.

Neuromorphic computing remains one of the hot areas for research at Intel Labs and eventually will work its way to commercialization. More details for those interested will be available on Intel.com.