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…
My Work and Thoughts.
modha.org
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
Fig. 19. An info-graphic illustrating major milestones of a 19-year journey.
Note that since 2015, NorthPole has been in the stealth mode.
brainchip.com
