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How are they shameful?

The majority is positive and having healthy discussions regarding the field of neural computing.

To quote a few comments talking directly about BrainChip:

"BrainChip" is hardware that is designed to work well for neural networks. The important thing about the BrainChip is that memory is "distributed"; instead of every neuron trying to access the same big memory storage area, each one has its own little area that it alone can access. This means that the neurons don't have to compete for access to memory, they can all just do their own little process without having to wait for eachother, which makes the neural networks a hell of a lot faster than if they were running on a Von Neumann machine.

These dudes made a unique type of computer chip that is better for neural networks because it gives each neuron its own little bit of memory rather than making them all compete for access to one big pool of memory.

I think this is the tradeoff they play. True North has 1 million neurons per chip while I think the "brainchip" is just the Snap64 with 64k neurons. [Not] multiplexing allows further efficiencies with memory densities.

The only direct negative comment about BrainChip I could find:

Guys this is mostly hype. The "brainchip" has only been shown as a proof of concept on an FPGA, and AFAIK the learning algorithm is STDP shown in software simulations. People have been doing both of these things for quite some time. In fact, IBM did this in 2011, and actually made a chip, but didn't find the hardware compelling enough to continue: http://www.modha.org/papers/013.CICC2.pdf

My reply to the comment above is that this person didn't bother to research what Brainchip is and thinks what BRN is doing is the same as IBM which we have all established many times is false.