An Extact Hardware Implementation of the Boltzmann Machine

We present a faithful hardware implementation of the Boltzmann machine. The prototype performs 505 megasynapses (millionof additionsand multiplications)per second, using 16-bit fixed-point weights. It can emulate fully connected instances of the Boltzmann machine containing up to 1438 variables. Our specialized hardware only executes the simplest part of the Boltzmann machine algorithm, namely multiplying matrices of numbers by vectors of bits. The other operations (which are complicated, but only require a modest amount of computation) are performed by the host processor.