According to Biggish Blue the device has been tested to be as adept at computer vision AI tasks as digital counterparts and is a lot more energy efficient.

The chip was fabricated in IBM’s Albany NanoTech Complex, and is composed of 64 analogue in-memory compute cores (or tiles), each of which contains 256-by-256 crossbar array of synaptic unit cells.

Compact, time-based analogue-to-digital converters are integrated into each tile to transition between the analogue and digital worlds. Each tile is integrated with lightweight digital processing units that perform simple nonlinear neuronal activation functions and scaling operations.

The chip has digital communication pathways at the chip interconnects of all the tiles and the global digital processing unit.