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Elena wanted one distinction kept straight . The pieces she was reading called almost any low - power neural chip a brain , and she needed to know what IBM's TrueNorth actually was . She was not hunting for a slogan about the end of ordinary computers . She wanted the architecture : where the memory sat , and what moved . TrueNorth , as IBM described it , holds one million programmable spiking neurons and 256 million configurable synapses on a single chip . The synapses are not stored off to the side for a processor to fetch , one weight after another . They sit with the neurons , across a large grid of cores . A conventional machine in the von Neumann pattern keeps memory apart from the arithmetic . For data - heavy work , a large share of the effort is the trip between the two . TrueNorth's bet is to shorten that trip . When a neuron fires , it sends a spike , and the chip does not have to haul every stored weight across a separate bus on every step . That is already enough to correct a second confusion . A memristor crossbar is a different bet that often travels under the same name . In that design , a device's conductance stands for a synaptic weight , and a row of analog multiplications can take place in the array itself . TrueNorth is not that array . It is a digital chip , built in ordinary silicon , that imitates spikes and keeps synapses local . Both ideas refuse a clean split between memory and arithmetic . They do not refuse it in the same material , and a sentence that merges them describes a chip nobody built . The limit is the part a brochure folds into the word efficient . A spike - based chip shows its point on jobs that arrive as events , such as picking objects out of a video stream . That design does not , by itself , make the chip the right home for every program a laptop runs . Intel's Loihi is another chip in the same broad family , also built around spikes , which keeps TrueNorth from standing in for the whole field . Neither chip is a small brain . A brain was the hint for the wiring . The silicon still has to be programmed , and the tools for that are not the ordinary tools a person already uses for everyday code . Elena closed her note on a narrower sentence than the one she had arrived with . Neuromorphic , on this evidence , means a machine that keeps synapses local and speaks in spikes . It does not mean a brain on a board , and it does not mean that every clever neural chip is the same clever chip .
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