Excepts from an article in PNAS (The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences):
NorthPole is an “AI Accelerator’ that’s “designed with energy efficiency in mind,” says Dharmendra Modha, IBM’s chief scientist for brain-inspired computing.
“We are driven not so much by neuroscience, but more by the intrinsic mathematical potential of the architecture,” he says.
In a 2023 paper, Modha and his team at IBM reported that the NorthPole neuromorphic chip successfully classified images from a dataset—a task often used to benchmark the performance of AI systems. The chip did so using a tiny fraction of the energy required by a conventional system, and it was five times faster. Modha believes that building chips differently, rather than only finding ways to shrink circuit dimensions and pack more processors onto integrated circuits, can lead to greater gains in energy efficiency. “Architecture trumps Moore’s Law,” he says.