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Frangipani

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Good to know that electrical engineer Spencer Williams, who until recently used to work for Viasat (https://www.viasat.com/) and is now Senior Digital Design Engineer at Malin Space Science Systems (https://www.msss.com/) is a huge fan of Brainchip!

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In my eyes, he is kind of the Southern California equivalent of Southern Germany’s Thomas Hülsing (Airbus Defence and Space) - both of them possibly just enthusiastic BRN shareholders spreading the word via LinkedIn, yet, at the same time they are obviously far from being your average Mum & Dad retail investor, as both are experts in the space industry, for which Akida is a match made in heaven…

So while we don’t know whether their employers share their zeal for Brainchip’s neuromorphic technology (I am tempted to add in ‘yet’), their likes may well carry quite a bit of weight within their LinkedIn network. And time will tell the rest…


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IloveLamp

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wilzy123

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Sam

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Sam

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Frangipani

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Short look on IBM:

There seems to be a significant change in the research of IBM. As I wrote yesterday, the analog design of TrueNorth had a lot of issues making it not suitable for commercial use. In mixed architectures with CNN there's a lack of compatibility cause of the clock free functionality. The analog design also is very sensible to higher temperatures making the processes running wild. Without additional cooling impossible to match with CPU/GPU. Also no foundry has the facilities to run a mass production of analog chips, even when possible it would lead to a wide quality spread in production.

The new IBM NorthPole chip is a digital design, so it's not an extension of TrueNorth but a new attempt. This shows many years of research at IBM been wasted. The new start throws them back in the timeline to something like Intel 5 years ago. As Intel is still in research phase there is no reason to worry about IBM.

To complete this an older article from the Brainchip site:

View attachment 47559

Hi @Perhaps, you are undoubtedly much tech-savvier than me, but as for your claim of IBM’s TrueNorth being analog, I beg to differ:


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The latest IBM neurosynaptic computer chip, called TrueNorth, consists of 1 million programmable neurons and 256 million programmable synapses conveying signals between the digital neurons. Each of the chip’s 4,096 neurosynaptic cores includes the entire computing package: memory, computation, and communication. Such architecture helps to bypass the bottleneck in traditional von Neumann computing, where program instructions and operation data cannot pass through the same route simultaneously.

(…)

One brainlike feature that IBM did not mimic to reduce power consumption was to make TrueNorth’s neurons analog instead of digital. The choice to go all-digital led to a number of advantages: First, IBM dodged the problem of slight differences in the manufacturing process or temperature fluctuations that have an outsize effect on analog circuits.

Second, the lack of analog circuitry allowed the IBM team to dramatically shrink its hardware
. Many experimental neuromorphic chips still use analog circuits that must be built using a process that on the Moore’s Law curve is more than a decade behind the process used today, Furber explains. By comparison, IBM fabricated its chip using Samsung’s 28-nanometer process technology—typical for manufacturing chips for today’s mobile devices.

And finally, the digital design enabled TrueNorth’s hardware to become functionally equivalent to its software—a factor that allowed the IBM software team to build TrueNorth applications on a simulator before the chip itself had been built.”



And as for me describing NorthPole being “an extension of TrueNorth”, I had actually copied this verbatim from the very article on IBM’s website I had linked in my first post about the new chip (https://research.ibm.com/blog/northpole-ibm-ai-chip):

“Over the last eight years, Modha has been working on a new type of digital AI chip for neural inference, which he calls NorthPole. It’s an extension of TrueNorth, the last brain-inspired chip that Modha worked on prior to 2014.”

 
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Oh for goodness sake, the guy asks a simple relevent question, then get the usual flogging by mindless GIF's, come on
guys, instead of childish GIF's respond with some sensible answers.
Nothing wrong with a childish gif if used correctly

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CHIPS

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BrainChip Podcast: Exploring Neuromorphic Computing with Industry Expert Michael Azoff​

In this episode, Rob Telson speaks with Industry Expert, Michael Azoff, about neuromorphic computing in the AI space including edge AI, neural network architectures, sensory-based applications, and more.​

(It is episode 11, but the article is of October 19, 2023)
 
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Tothemoon24

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Lien described openness as a key element in Tenstorrent's strategy, and the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) plays a pivotal role in achieving this. RISC-V's open and collaborative nature provides a level playing field for various vendors, fostering flexibility and innovation.


Lien also envisions the future of smart mobility being enabled by AI by both inference and training, taking place both at the edge and in the cloud. Some car companies are already trying to build and implement that long-term strategy, in a vision to create a technological advantage that would differentiate themselves from other EV competitors with the help of Tenstorrent.
 
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Tothemoon24

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In contrast, the RZ family is a newer generation of embedded processors that does not incorporate Flash ROM and uses a state-of-the-art process which significantly improve performance.
One of the RZ family, the RZ/V2L AI processor, is equipped with two Cortex-A55, the latest 64-bit CPU core from Arm, and can run at 1.2 GHz, a much higher operating frequency than MCUs.

And the RZBOARD V2L, a Raspberry Pi type single board computer equipped with RZ/V2L, was released this summer.
 
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Frangipani

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The new IBM NorthPole chip is a digital design, so it's not an extension of TrueNorth but a new attempt. This shows many years of research at IBM been wasted. The new start throws them back in the timeline to something like Intel 5 years ago. As Intel is still in research phase there is no reason to worry about IBM.

I already addressed the fact that TrueNorth is digital and not analog in an earlier post today, and ensuingly there is something else I would disagree with you on:

While NorthPole may not pose an imminent threat to Akida (IBM’s chief scientist for brain-inspired computing and the project’s technical lead, Dr Dharmendra Modha, states in yesterday’s blog post on his personal website that “Please note that NorthPole chip, software, systems are research prototypes, in IBM Research, and that NorthPole is designed for inference (not training).”) and our resident hardware expert @Diogenese even reckons that NorthPole is a toothless tiger anyway and in fact sees Brainchip as having extended its technology lead, I think you are vastly overestimating the work and time IBM actually “wasted” over the past couple of years, since after all they didn’t have to start from scratch. Have a look at NorthPole’s development timeline. All in stealth mode. The veil of secrecy was lifted only very recently at the Hot Chips 2023 Conference in late August. Do you really think that DARPA, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering as well as AFRL would have continued with this partnership for fourteen (!) long years, if they had felt at some point over the past couple of years it had been pretty much a waste of time and money?

The fact that their collaboration with IBM has been ongoing for almost one and a half decades, however, also signifies that said US government agencies must have seen added benefit in experimenting with Akida, which of course is superb validation for both former Chief Scientist of IBM Internet Security Systems Peter van der Made and IIT Bombay alumni Anil Mankar (same alma mater as IBM’s Dharmendra Modha)!

And yet - despite Akida clearly being the superior tech according to our resident forum experts - the DoD didn’t cut the contract and stop the collaboration with IBM after getting their hands on Akida 1000, so they have apparently ascertained distinct use cases for both NorthPole and Akida (on-chip learning!).

Unless of course this long-term partnership were to serve as a prime example of the sunk cost fallacy…



NorthPole: Neural Inference at the Frontier of Energy, Space, and Time
October 19, 2023 By dmodha


§A. Breaking News:
Today in Science Magazine, a major new article from IBM Research introducing a new brain-inspired, silicon-optimized chip architecture suitable for neural inference. The chip, NorthPole, is the result of nearly two decades of work by scientists (see illustration in §O below) at IBM Research and has been an outgrowth of a 14 year partnership with United States Department of Defense (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, and Air Force Research Laboratory).
NorthPole, implemented using a 12-nm process on-shore in US, outperforms all of the existing specialized chips for running neural networks on ResNet50 and Yolov4, even those using more advanced technology processes. Additional results on BERT-base were presented at Hot Chips Symposium.




(…)


§F. History & Context:

In 2004, nineteen years ago, I had a stark realization that I was going to die — not imminently, but eventually. Therefore, 7,034 days ago, on July 16, 2004, I decided to focus my life’s limited energy on brain-inspired computing — a career wager against improbable odds. Along the way, we carried out simulations at the scale of mouse, rat, cat, monkey, and, eventually, human brains — winning ACM’s Gordon Bell Prizealong the way. We mapped (Link: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1008054107) the long-distance wiring diagram of the primate brain. TrueNorth won the inaugural Misha Mahowald Prize and is in the Computer History Museum. I was named R&D Magazine’s Scientist of the Year, became an IBM Fellow, was named Distinguished Alumni of IIT Bombay, and was named Distinguished Alumni of UCSD ECE Department. The project has been featured on the covers of Scientific American, Science (twice), and Communications of the ACM.

The first idea for NorthPole was conceived on May 30, 2015, in a flash of meditative insight, at Crissy Field in San Francisco. The main motivation was to dramatically reduce capital cost of TrueNorth. Over the next few years, collaboratively and creatively, we pushed boundaries of innovation along all aspects of computation, memory, communication, control, and IO. Starting in 2018, we went under stealth mode. To focus fully on NorthPole, we turned down all talk invitations and we stopped the flow of publications, taking a huge risk. Along the way, the project encountered many technical, economic, and political obstacles and nearly died many times — not even counting the pandemic. The unique combination of the environment of IBM Research and the long-term support of DoD was the key to forward progress. So, TrueNorth and NorthPole are a story of seeking long-term rewards, a tale of epic collaborations, an example of team creativity (Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/jobs/when-debate-stalls-try-your-paintbrush.html), an account of perseverance and steadfastness of purpose, and a chronicle of a vision realized. To quote General Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan project, “now it can be told.”

TrueNorth was a direction, NorthPole is a destination.


Although we have been working on it for 19 years, this moment can be best described by quoting Winston Churchill: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”


(…)

O. A continuing 19-year journey

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Fig. 19. An info-graphic illustrating major milestones of a 19-year journey.
Note that since 2015, NorthPole has been in the stealth mode.
 
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Diogenese

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I already addressed the fact that TrueNorth is digital and not analog in an earlier post today, and ensuingly there is something else I would disagree with you on:

While NorthPole may not pose an imminent threat to Akida (IBM’s chief scientist for brain-inspired computing and the project’s technical lead, Dr Dharmendra Modha, states in yesterday’s blog post on his personal website that “Please note that NorthPole chip, software, systems are research prototypes, in IBM Research, and that NorthPole is designed for inference (not training).”) and our resident hardware expert @Diogenese even reckons that NorthPole is a toothless tiger anyway and in fact sees Brainchip as having extended its technology lead, I think you are vastly overestimating the work and time IBM actually “wasted” over the past couple of years, since after all they didn’t have to start from scratch. Have a look at NorthPole’s development timeline. All in stealth mode. The veil of secrecy was lifted only very recently at the Hot Chips 2023 Conference in late August. Do you really think that DARPA, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering as well as AFRL would have continued with this partnership for fourteen (!) long years, if they had felt at some point over the past couple of years it had been pretty much a waste of time and money?

The fact that their collaboration with IBM has been ongoing for almost one and a half decades, however, also signifies that said US government agencies must have seen added benefit in experimenting with Akida, which of course is superb validation for both former Chief Scientist of IBM Internet Security Systems Peter van der Made and IIT Bombay alumni Anil Mankar (same alma mater as IBM’s Dharmendra Modha)!

And yet - despite Akida clearly being the superior tech according to our resident forum experts - the DoD didn’t cut the contract and stop the collaboration with IBM after getting their hands on Akida 1000, so they have apparently ascertained distinct use cases for both NorthPole and Akida (on-chip learning!).

Unless of course this long-term partnership were to serve as a prime example of the sunk cost fallacy…



NorthPole: Neural Inference at the Frontier of Energy, Space, and Time
October 19, 2023 By dmodha


§A. Breaking News:
Today in Science Magazine, a major new article from IBM Research introducing a new brain-inspired, silicon-optimized chip architecture suitable for neural inference. The chip, NorthPole, is the result of nearly two decades of work by scientists (see illustration in §O below) at IBM Research and has been an outgrowth of a 14 year partnership with United States Department of Defense (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, and Air Force Research Laboratory).
NorthPole, implemented using a 12-nm process on-shore in US, outperforms all of the existing specialized chips for running neural networks on ResNet50 and Yolov4, even those using more advanced technology processes. Additional results on BERT-base were presented at Hot Chips Symposium.




(…)


§F. History & Context:

In 2004, nineteen years ago, I had a stark realization that I was going to die — not imminently, but eventually. Therefore, 7,034 days ago, on July 16, 2004, I decided to focus my life’s limited energy on brain-inspired computing — a career wager against improbable odds. Along the way, we carried out simulations at the scale of mouse, rat, cat, monkey, and, eventually, human brains — winning ACM’s Gordon Bell Prizealong the way. We mapped (Link: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1008054107) the long-distance wiring diagram of the primate brain. TrueNorth won the inaugural Misha Mahowald Prize and is in the Computer History Museum. I was named R&D Magazine’s Scientist of the Year, became an IBM Fellow, was named Distinguished Alumni of IIT Bombay, and was named Distinguished Alumni of UCSD ECE Department. The project has been featured on the covers of Scientific American, Science (twice), and Communications of the ACM.

The first idea for NorthPole was conceived on May 30, 2015, in a flash of meditative insight, at Crissy Field in San Francisco. The main motivation was to dramatically reduce capital cost of TrueNorth. Over the next few years, collaboratively and creatively, we pushed boundaries of innovation along all aspects of computation, memory, communication, control, and IO. Starting in 2018, we went under stealth mode. To focus fully on NorthPole, we turned down all talk invitations and we stopped the flow of publications, taking a huge risk. Along the way, the project encountered many technical, economic, and political obstacles and nearly died many times — not even counting the pandemic. The unique combination of the environment of IBM Research and the long-term support of DoD was the key to forward progress. So, TrueNorth and NorthPole are a story of seeking long-term rewards, a tale of epic collaborations, an example of team creativity (Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/jobs/when-debate-stalls-try-your-paintbrush.html), an account of perseverance and steadfastness of purpose, and a chronicle of a vision realized. To quote General Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan project, “now it can be told.”

TrueNorth was a direction, NorthPole is a destination.


Although we have been working on it for 19 years, this moment can be best described by quoting Winston Churchill: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”


(…)

O. A continuing 19-year journey

View attachment 47582
Fig. 19. An info-graphic illustrating major milestones of a 19-year journey.
Note that since 2015, NorthPole has been in the stealth mode.



Although NorthPole is a destination, it does not do learning. I wonder if going into stealth mode, huddled down with the spooks from DARPA, inhibited the development team's openness to external ideas. Compare the major changes that Akida 1 underwent based on EAP feedback, and more so Akida 2.

IBM continues to research analog NNs. This may have to do with the DARPA as analog is said to be inherently radhard - NASA still holds a candle for analog.

US2023206964A1 DIGITAL PHASE CHANGE MEMORY (PCM) ARRAY FOR ANALOG COMPUTING

1697847650914.png


A plurality of bit lines corresponding to elements of an input vector intersect a plurality of word lines and a plurality of memristive cells are located at the intersections. At least three cells are grouped together to represent a single matrix element. At least three word lines correspond to each element of an output vector. An A/D converter is coupled to each of the word lines, and for each line, except a first, in each group, a shifter has an input coupled to one of the A/D converters. For each group, an addition-subtraction block adds the output of the A/D converter coupled to the first one of the word lines to outputs of each of the shifters except that for a last one of the word lines, subtracts the output of the last shifter, and outputs a corresponding element of an output vector.
 
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