Artificial Intelligence Unit
The IBM Research prototype chip that became the commercial Spyre Accelerator. Thirty-two cores, never sold.
The AIU was IBM Research's answer to a simple question: if an AI engine inside a processor core works, what happens when the whole chip is that engine? It carried 32 cores closely related to the AI accelerator already proven inside the IBM Telum mainframe processor, each with its own scratchpad memory rather than sharing one pool. The design was never sold. It became the Spyre Accelerator, which kept the 32-core count and the per-core scratchpad arrangement. Understanding the AIU explains what the Spyre card is built for: answering quickly next to the data, not training large models.
Related Terms
Spyre Accelerator
IBM's PCIe AI inference card. On IBM Power 11 it carries 32 cores, 128 GB of memory, and more than 300 TOPS inside a 75 watt envelope.
Telum II
IBM's z17 mainframe processor, with an AI accelerator on the chip itself. It does not go in a Power server, but it is where IBM's current AI hardware argument was proven.
NorthPole
An IBM Research chip with no off-chip memory at all, claiming 25 times the energy efficiency of a conventional architecture. Research only, not for sale.