IBM recently debuted a new prototype artificial intelligence chip purported to be both faster and far more energy efficient than any chip currently available.in Science Magazine on Oct. 19, the new chip, dubbed NorthPole, “achieves a 25 times higher energy metric” on a relevant benchmark, “and a 22 times lower time metric of latency.”
Damien Querlioz, a nanoelectronics researcher at the University of Paris-Saclay in Palaiseau, described NorthPole’s energy efficiency as “mind-blowing,” in an article“NorthPole outperforms all prevalent architectures, even those that use more-advanced technology processes.” This is especially true at “the edge,” where chips and data are stored together. Removing this bottleneck has long been considered by many experts to be the key to running powerful neural networks locally on devices.According to IBM Research, the new prototype chip built in the company’s Alamaden, California laboratory bypasses the von Neumann bottleneck by, essentially, integrating the memory component onto the processing chip itself.