http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28688781
They describe it as a supercomputer the size of a postage stamp.
Each neuron on the chip connects to 256 others, and together they can pick out the key features in a visual scene in real time, using very little power.
The design is the result of a long-running collaboration, led by IBM, and is published in the journal Science.
"The cumulative total is over 200 person-years of work," said Dr Dharmendra Modha, the publication's senior author.
He told BBC News the processor was "a new machine for a new era". But it will take some time for the chip, dubbed TrueNorth, to be commercially useful.
This is partly because programs need to be written from scratch to run on this type of chip, instead of on the traditional style which was conceived in the 1940s and still powers nearly all modern computers.
That design, where the processors and memory are separate, is a natural match for sequential, mathematical operations.
However, the heavily interconnected structure of biologically-inspired, "neuromorphic" systems like TrueNorth is said to be a much more efficient way of handling a lot of data at the same time.
To demonstrate TrueNorth's capabilities, Dr Modha's team programmed it to do a visual perception party trick.
Within a video filmed from a tower at Stanford University, a single chip analysed the moving images in real time and successfully identified which patches of pixels represented pedestrians, cyclists, cars, buses and trucks.
This is just the sort of task that the brain excels at, while traditional computers struggle.
Potential applications and more at the link.
