Subj : IBM used AMD's other not-so-secret weapon to deliver yet another
To   : All
From : TechnologyDaily
Date : Sat Nov 11 2023 20:15:05

IBM used AMD's other not-so-secret weapon to deliver yet another brain-like 
chip  NorthPole is faster and uses less energy than Nvidia's best AI GPU and 
it's only the beginning

Date:
Sat, 11 Nov 2023 19:58:44 +0000

Description:
IBMs NorthPole is 25-times more efficient than the best GPUs and the best 
CPUs out there.

FULL STORY
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IBMs NorthPole chip  nearly ten years in the making  is going from strength 
to strength and achieved a new milestone with researchers publishing a set of 
fantastic benchmarking results in the journal Science. 

The 12nm chip, built on the TrueNorth architecture, is 25-times more power 
efficient than commonly used 12nm GPUs and 14nm CPUs. This is according to 
testing on the ResNet-50 model, and was measured as the number of frames 
interpreted per joule of power. 

NorthPole is also much better in terms of latency and space required to 
compute, and outperofrms all major architectures, including a GPU implemented 
using a 4nm process, according to IBM. Melding computing power with memory 

How does it manage to achieve such results? The memory is on the chip itself 
rather than connected separately  embedded in each of the 256 cores on the 
chip. NorthPole also comprises 22 billion transistors, and its cores can 
perform 2,048 operators per core. 

Its architecture eliminates the Von Neumann bottleneck, according to the 
firm, which revolves around the delays caused by the need for data to travel 
between the CPU and RAM in most systems. As a result, it can perform much 
faster than the best GPUs out there, including the best AI-centric graphics 
cards by Nvidia. 

Architecturally, NorthPole blurs the boundary between compute and memory, 
said IBM Researchs Dharmendra Modha. "At the level of individual cores, 
NorthPole appears as memory-near-compute and from outside the chip, at the 
level of input-output, it appears as an active memory. 

AMD has also tapped into the concept of combining memory and compute on a 
single component. Building on the theme of processor-in-memory (PIM), Xilinx 
showcased its Virtex XCVU7P card last month , which had eight 
accelerator-in-meomry (AiM) modules. 

IBM, which adds memory to each compute core in its NorthPole chip, sees this 
component as perfect for emerging AI use cases, including computer 
vision-related uses. It was also tested on natural language processing and 
speech recognition. NorthPole is also suited to edge applications that 
require massive amounts of data processing in real-time. More from TechRadar 
Pro These are the best graphics cards for all budgets Check out the fastest 
CPUs on the planet right now Nvidia, beware! IBM has a new analog AI chip 
that could give the H100 a run for its money



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Link to news story:
https://www.techradar.com/pro/ibm-used-amds-other-not-so-secret-weapon-to-deli
ver-yet-another-brain-like-chip-northpole-is-faster-and-uses-less-energy-than-
nvidias-best-ai-gpu-and-its-only-the-beginning


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