Christine Thropp
IBM will provide the U.S. Air Force with a new chip prototype for test and demonstration under a three-year, $48.2 million cost reimbursement contract.
The Department of Defense said Thursday IBM Almaden Research Center’s contract work includes research, design, development and delivery of NorthPole Hub hardware and software.
The research lab will also be responsible for the architecture’s implementation, integration and documentation, with efforts expected to be completed by May 28, 2027.
According to a Science article IBM quoted, NorthPole, using the ResNet-50 model as a benchmark, is considerably more efficient than common 12-nm GPUs and 14-nm CPUs. The chip was fabricated with a 12-nm node process, contains 22 billion transistors in 800 square millimeters and has 256 cores and can perform 2,048 operations per core per cycle at 8-bit precision.
The company won against one other bidder in a competitive acquisition for the contract.
The Air Force Research Laboratory, which serves as the contracting activity, is obligating $500,000 from fiscal 2024 research and development funds to IBM at the time of the award.
