Intel has been steadily increasing its portfolio of products in the AI space, through the acquisition of multiple AI-focused companies such as Nervana, Mobileye, and others. Through its increased portfolio of AI-related IP, the company is looking to carve itself a slice of the AI computing market, and this sometimes means thinking inside the box more than outside of it. It really doesn't matter the amount of cores and threads you can put on your HEDT system: the human brain's wetware is still one of the most impressive computation machines known to man.

That idea is what's behind of neuromorphic computing, where chips are being designed to mimic the overall architecture of the human brain, with neurons, synapses and all. It marries the fields of biology, physics, mathematics, computer science, and electronic engineering to design artificial neural systems, mimicking the morphology of individual neurons, circuits, applications, and overall architectures. This, in turn, affects how information is represented, influences robustness to damage due to the distribution of workload through a "many cores" design, incorporates learning and development, adapts to local change (plasticity), and facilitates evolutionary change.