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.
NorthPole carries 22 billion transistors on a 12 nm process and eliminates off-chip memory entirely, intertwining compute with memory on the die so data does not have to travel. IBM Research publishes 25 times higher energy efficiency and 5 times higher space efficiency than conventional architectures, with native support for 2-bit, 4-bit, and 8-bit precision. One demonstration processed dense high-resolution video for multi-class object detection on roughly 5 watts, and results presented at IEEE HPEC in September 2024 showed a 3 billion parameter IBM Granite model running on it. There is no NorthPole product, no price, and no announced arrival on an IBM Power roadmap.
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