AFRL says IBM’s neuromorphic chip can pick out tanks from radar images

A neuromorphic CMOS chip produced by IBM is able to pick out tanks and other vehicles from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images while using a minimal amount of energy to do so.

DARPA SyNAPSE 16 Chip Board
By DARPA SyNAPSE [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) pits the IBM’s TrueNorth chip against a Nvidia-powered computer called the Jetson TX-1. Both were able to distinguish 10 classes of military and civilian vehicles in a public data set but the IBM chip used between a 20th and a 30th as much power, MIT’s Technology Review reports.