Numenta's co-founder is Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of Palm. He wrote a book "On intelligence" about how our brains are supposed to work. Is here anybody who's familiar how much of the ideas presented in the book have been found useful in AI? The article hints about this inspiration but is sparse on details (non pun really here).
My sense is that these techniques would speed up performance on any hardware platform but Intel just got to them first. Good for them, god knows they need all the help they can get.