Technology thesis · Semiconductors & Chips
low conviction conceptNeuromorphic computing
Brain-inspired chips slash power for always-on edge sensing, but Intel Loihi and IBM NorthPole stay research-only; the real test is whether BrainChip and Innatera win high-volume edge designs.
Position maintained continuously · last reviewed Jun 24, 2026
The thesis
State of the art (2026)
Neuromorphic remains a research field with a thin commercial edge. The flagship system, Intel's Hala Point (1.15 billion neurons across 1,152 Loihi 2 chips), runs at Sandia as a research platform, not a product, and Intel has shipped no official Loihi 3 silicon. IBM's NorthPole is likewise a research inference architecture. The real traction is at the edge: BrainChip, the only listed pure-play, raised $25m in December 2025 to scale Akida 2; Innatera began shipping its Pulsar SNN microcontroller into consumer wearables and smart-home devices in early 2026; SpiNNcloud is commercialising SpiNNaker 2. Patent filings surged in 2025, but spiking-network software tooling and a killer high-volume application are still missing.
Core thesis
Neuromorphic chips process information with spiking neural networks, trading dense clocked matrix maths for sparse, event-driven activity that can cut inference power by one to two orders of magnitude on the right workloads. The hardware is real: Intel's Hala Point packs 1.15 billion neurons across 1,152 Loihi 2 chips at Sandia, and IBM's NorthPole shows roughly 25x the energy efficiency of a comparable 12nm GPU on ResNet-50. But general-purpose neuromorphic remains a long-horizon bet. Spiking-network software tooling lags PyTorch by years, mainstream models do not map cleanly onto spikes, and the advantage is confined to narrow problem classes. The live commercial slice is the edge: always-on sensing silicon (BrainChip Akida, SynSense, Innatera Pulsar) and event-based vision (Prophesee/Sony, iniVation), where sub-milliwatt, microsecond-latency sensing is a genuine physics win rather than a research demo.
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Signal stack
Evidence stacked leading → lagging
Technology-native KPIs
Metrics that predict trajectory, tracked over time
Landscape map
Who builds what — and who depends on whom
Catalyst calendar
Dated events that will move the position
Technology roadmap
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Watchlists
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Decision frameworks
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Thesis changelog
When our view changed, and why
Change our mind
2 disconfirming conditions
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