After nearly a decade of development, IBM’s NorthPole chip has reached a significant milestone, as highlighted in a recent publication in the Science journal. The groundbreaking 12nm chip, utilizing the TrueNorth architecture, demonstrates exceptional prowess in power efficiency.
In comparison to widely-used 12nm GPUs and 14nm CPUs, the NorthPole chip boasts an impressive 25-fold increase in power efficiency. This remarkable achievement is based on benchmarking results, specifically on the ResNet-50 model, where the performance was evaluated in terms of frames interpreted per joule of power.
Moreover, NorthPole excels in terms of both latency and computational space requirements, surpassing major architectures, including a 4nm process GPU. IBM’s dedication to innovation is evident in NorthPole’s consistent outperformance across various metrics.
Revolutionizing Processing: NorthPole’s Integrated Computing Power and Memory
Merging computing prowess with memory efficiency is NorthPole’s key strength. The chip’s distinctive feature is its on-chip memory, embedded within each of its 256 cores. Boasting 22 billion transistors, NorthPole’s cores exhibit a remarkable capacity, performing 2,048 operators per core.
This architectural innovation eradicates the Von Neumann bottleneck, a common delay in data travel between CPU and RAM. Consequently, NorthPole’s performance surpasses leading GPUs, including top-notch AI-centric graphics cards like Nvidia’s.
IBM Research’s Dharmendra Modha elucidates, “Architecturally, NorthPole blurs the boundary between computing and memory.” At the core level, it operates as a memory-near-compute, presenting itself externally as an active memory during input-output processes.
Drawing parallels, AMD explores the processor-in-memory (PIM) concept, showcased in Xilinx’s Virtex XCVU7P card featuring eight accelerator-in-memory (AiM) modules. IBM’s NorthPole, augmenting memory in each compute core, aligns perfectly with emerging AI applications such as computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition.
Versatile and adept, NorthPole is tailor-made for edge applications demanding real-time, extensive data processing. The chip’s integration of memory and computing elevates its prominence in the ever-evolving landscape of advanced computing solutions.
