IBM has developed a new prototype AI chip called NorthPole, which is claimed to be faster and more energy-efficient than any other chip available. The chip has achieved a 25 times higher energy metric and a 22 times lower time metric of latency, which could lead to post-GPU performance at a fraction of the cost in energy requirements. The NorthPole chip integrates the memory component onto the processing chip itself, bypassing the von Neumann bottleneck. The chip's benchmark results indicate that it could perform well in tasks such as autonomous surgery, self-driving cars, and robotics-related endeavors. IBM Research is already working on the next chip using the NorthPole architecture.