IBM Dharmendra's team develop 25x better AI neural inference chip called NorthPole

IBM Research's newest prototype AI chip called NorthPole based on a new chip architecture is faster and energy-efficient compared to most advanced processors chips today. After two decades of research, the prototype AI chip made by IBM’s lab in California is said to be a drastic shift from past von Neumann bottlenecks, where processor and the memory were discrete. IBM developing this while there is massive adoptation of AI in computing. NorthPole has the option of customizing the bit precision as needed, which allows for optimization of the power usage diffrernt from analog in-memory computing.
IBM reported it tested this chip on the popular ResNet-50 image recognition and YOLOv4 object detection models, where IBM claims this device delivered higher energy efficiency, higher space efficiency, and lower latency than any other chip currently in the market, and is roughly 4,000 times faster than TrueNorth. TrueNorth is the last brain-inspired chip that IBM has worked on prior to 2014. The results from NorthPole chips were published in Science. The team headed by Dharmendra Modha inspired from how the brain computes. “Architecturally, NorthPole blurs the boundary between compute and memory,” Modha said. "At the level of individual cores, NorthPole appears as memory-near-compute an...