A prototype microchip design revealed today by IBM could pave the way for a world of much smarter devices that don't rely on the cloud or the internet for their intelligence. That could help soldiers who operate drones, ground robots, or augmented-reality gear against adversaries who can target electronic emissions. But the new chip—modeled loosely on the human brain—also paves the way for a different sort of AI, one that doesn't rely on big cloud and data companies like Amazon or Google.
Unlike traditional chips that separate memory from processing circuits, the NorthPole chip combines the two—like synapses in the brain that hold and process information based on their connection to other neurons. Writing in the journal Science, IBM researchers
call it a "neural inference architecture that blurs this boundary by eliminating off-chip memory, intertwining compute with memory on-chip, and appearing externally as an active memory."
Why is that important and what does it have to do with the future? Today's computers have at least two characteristics that limit AI development.
First, they need a lot of power. Your brain, running on just
12 watts of power, can retain and retrieve the information you need have a detailed conversation while simultaneously absorbing, correctly interpreting, and making decisions about the enormous amount of sensory data required to drive a car. But a desktop computer requires 175 watts just to process the ones and zeros of an orderly spreadsheet. This is one reason why
computer vision in cars and drones is so difficult, a huge limiting factor for autonomy. This energy inefficiency is one reason why many of today's AI tools depend on enormous enterprise cloud farms that consume enough energy to
power a small town.
The second problem is that we're
reaching the atomic limit of how many transistors we can fit on a chip...
The NorthPole chip has 22 billion transistors and 256
cores, according to the paper. There are, of course, chips with more transistors and more cores. But NorthPole's unique architecture allows it to operate exponentially more efficiently on tasks like processing moving images. Against a comparable chip with "12nm silicon technology process node and with a comparable number of transistors, NorthPole delivers 25✕ higher frames/joule," according to the paper. If you wanted to connect a lot of them in an enterprise cloud environment to run a generative AI program like ChatGPT, you could shrink that cloud down considerably. Cloud computing that used to take a massive building of servers suddenly fits in the back of a plane. But of course you also need fewer chips for things like small drones and robots...
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