Did you watch the video? Anya does get excited about new technology. She does mention Brainchip.

It would be interesting to see a technical comparison between NorthPole and Akida. Unfortunately Akida was not included in the performance comparison.


https://www.science.org/stoken/author-tokens/ST-1491/full

Neural inference at the frontier of energy, space, and time

Editor’s summary

The amount of data humans process and send around the globe on a daily basis is astonishing. However, the energy cost involved is high, and there is a strong need for designing energy-efficient devices. Modha et al. describe a chip with a neural inspired architecture, called NorthPole, that achieves substantially higher performance, energy efficiency, and area efficiency compared with other comparable architectures (see the Perspective by Iyer and Roychowdhury). A key feature of this chip is the recognition that for almost all kinds of computing, access to memory plays as important a role as logic processing. Unlike analog in-memory computing, this purely digital system has the option of tailoring the bit precision as needed, which allows for optimization of the power usage. —Peter Stern

Abstract

Computing, since its inception, has been processor-centric, with memory separated from compute. Inspired by the organic brain and optimized for inorganic silicon, NorthPole is a neural inference architecture that blurs this boundary by eliminating off-chip memory, intertwining compute with memory on-chip, and appearing externally as an active memory chip. NorthPole is a low-precision, massively parallel, densely interconnected, energy-efficient, and spatial computing architecture with a co-optimized, high-utilization programming model. On the ResNet50 benchmark image classification network, relative to a graphics processing unit (GPU) that uses a comparable 12-nanometer technology process, NorthPole achieves a 25 times higher energy metric of frames per second (FPS) per watt, a 5 times higher space metric of FPS per transistor, and a 22 times lower time metric of latency. Similar results are reported for the Yolo-v4 detection network. NorthPole outperforms all prevalent architectures, even those that use more-advanced technology processes.