Connecting with Devs at Intel Innovation 2022

Intel Labs demonstrated Kapoho Point and Lava v0.5 for the first time.

@Danielle Rager (Deactivated) is a research scientist with Intel Labs and expert in online learning.

The recent Intel Innovation 2022 (ION) event featured several neuromorphic innovations with both a Kapoho Point demo booth and a hands-on Lava lab session. At the booth, we announced Intel Labs' first deliveries of the 8-chip Loihi 2 boards to INRC members.

Kapoho Point advances Intel’s goal of bringing neuromorphic technology to commercial applications by providing a compact form-factor suitable for low-latency edge devices and a stackable design suitable for high performance computing in the lab. Built with Loihi 2, Intel’s latest generation neuromorphic computing architecture, Kapoho Point enables developers to accelerate AI models with up to 1 billion parameters or solve optimization problems with up to 8 million variables.

Kapoho Point board (front right) on display. The board offers 8 Loihi 2 neuromorphic test chips: 4 shown on the top side with 4 more on the bottom. Along the top edge of Kapoho Point is a standard FPGA Mezzanine Connector (FMC) that connects to the host system and can stack vertically with additional Kapoho Point boards. The Oheo Gulch with Arria 10 FPGA host system (back left) initializes and connects the Kapoho Point to a developer workstation (not shown).

Our ION booth and lab demonstrated a 9-layer PilotNet deep learning sample workload running on a Kapoho Point system in real-time. We showcased how the modular, open-source software framework Lava makes it easy to program neuromorphic models and how Loihi 2’s new graded spike and convolutional compression features, both now supported in the Lava v0.5 release, make deep learning inference on Loihi hardware like Kapoho Point more efficient than ever.

Kapoho Point can be stacked to scale up for larger workloads. A stack of 4 Kapoho Point boards could support up to 32 million neurons and 4 billion synapses.

Accenture’s @Andreea Danielescu joined our team in the Innovation Zone to share her views on the role that next-generation neuromorphic architectures will play in intelligent edge computing, powering applications from extended-reality headsets for the Metaverse to intelligent mobile robots. As an integral member of the INRC, Accenture’s research on improving the developer experience for neuromorphic computing was right at home in the Dev-focused ION event.

I also had the pleasure of discussing the future of our neuromorphic research program with Intel CTO Greg Lavender and Intel Labs Director Rich Uhlig. Look out for a recording of those conversations to come.

If you’d like to learn more about running your own applications on Kapoho Point, visit About the INRC