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

The IBM NorthPole chip.

IBM’s 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.