IBM Research Unveils “NorthPole” AI Chip, Runs 22x Faster Than Current Chip Offerings

wccftech.com:

IBM Research has developed its first-ever AI-dedicated chip known as Northpole, which reportedly provides 22 times faster performance than other industry offerings.

The news comes from a paper published in the Science journal, which talks about IBM's upcoming AI accelerator codenamed NorthPole. With the influx of the "AI frenzy" in the industry, a lot of chip manufacturers are moving towards creating their own solutions with the sole aim of surpassing the computing performance of the industry leaders and meeting the surging demand for AI.

The new data published by IBM Research hints that the "NorthPole" AI chip is set to establish new benchmarks within the industry, particularly due to the fact that the company's approach with its AI chip is indeed fascinating.

Project's Leader Dharmendra Modha sees great optimism with the chip architecture. Now, IBM Research's implementation is that the firm combines neural inference architectures into chip processing itself, which is why Modha categorizes it as a "human brain". Its efficient CPU interconnectivity coupled with all-digital architecture allows inter-communication much faster, which is why NorthPole outputs such performance.

Speaking of specifications, the NorthPole AI chip employs a 12nm node processing technology, which in industry terms is fairly old, however, IBM Research believes that the chip surpasses modern 4nm AI GPUs as well, due to the utilization of the ResNet-50 neural network model. This achievement negates Moore's Law as well, and to some extent, obeys the core elements of Huang's Law, which focuses on individual chip stacks rather than process shrinking.

Architecturally, NorthPole blurs the boundary between compute and memory. At the level of individual cores,