Tangible Neuron

Tangible Neuron is an experimental AI-first processor architecture developed as a research project by Tangible Research.

Neuron explores how a processor can be designed around modern artificial intelligence workloads rather than treating AI acceleration as an afterthought. The project currently focuses on processor architecture, instruction-set design, vector and matrix execution, dataflow acceleration, compiler optimization, and hardware/software co-design.

Current Direction

Neuron is being designed as a heterogeneous architecture containing multiple forms of computation:

• Scalar processing for general-purpose control and program execution
• Vector processing for highly parallel operations
• Matrix and tensor processing for AI workloads
• A programmable dataflow-style AI execution fabric
• Dedicated architectural state for AI execution and accelerator control

The current experimental register architecture includes:

• R0-R15 — 32-bit scalar registers
• V0-V7 — vector registers
• M0-M3 — matrix/tensor registers
• P0-P3 — predicate registers
• PC — program counter
• SP — stack pointer
• FP — frame pointer
• STATUS — processor status and condition flags
• AI, quantization, sparsity, and tensor control registers

Research Goals

Tangible Neuron is intended to investigate questions such as:

• How should an AI-first ISA differ from a conventional CPU ISA?
• Which operations belong in scalar, vector, matrix, or dataflow hardware?
• Can frequently repeated AI computation graphs be mapped onto interconnected processing elements?
• How should a compiler automatically discover and schedule parallel AI workloads?
• How can data movement and memory bandwidth be reduced?
• How should hardware threading interact with vector and AI execution?
• Which numerical formats should be efficiently supported for training and inference?
• How should the architecture balance specialization with long-term programmability?

Current Work

The project currently includes an early Neuron32 instruction-set simulator written in Rust.

Development is progressing through research and experimentation in:

1. ISA design
2. Scalar execution
3. Vector execution
4. Matrix/tensor execution
5. Dataflow acceleration
6. Memory architecture
7. Hardware threading
8. Compiler and optimizer design
9. Display and device architecture
10. Architecture simulation and benchmarking

Project Philosophy

Neuron is not intended to simply reproduce an existing processor architecture with additional AI instructions.

The long-term goal is to investigate a processor architecture in which the ISA, compiler, memory system, execution engines, and AI accelerator are designed together.

Architectural decisions are expected to evolve through implementation, simulation, published computer-architecture research, experimentation, and feedback from researchers.

Status

Early research and architecture development.

The ISA, execution model, accelerator architecture, and compiler design are experimental and subject to significant change.

Development

Run the same checks used by CI locally:

cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --all-targets --locked -- -D warnings
cargo test --all-targets --locked
cargo build --release --locked

GitHub Actions runs these checks for every push and pull request. After a successful push to main, it publishes index.html and Neuron.png to GitHub Pages. In the repository's Settings → Pages, select GitHub Actions as the publishing source once before the first deployment.

Tangible Research

Tangible Neuron is part of Tangible Research, an independent research effort focused on building and exploring new computing and artificial intelligence systems.

Make AI Tangible.