Intel has officially announced the launch of the world’s first USB-based deep learning interference kit and self-contained artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator. Dubbed as Movidius Neural Compute Stick, the device delivers dedicated deep neural network processing capabilities to a wide range of host devices.

 

 

With the increase in the number of developers resorting to advanced machine learning approaches so as to build innovative solutions, Intel is aiming to render the most comprehensive set of development tools and resources to ensure that the developers are retooling for an AI-centric digital economy.

 

 

Intel offers a comprehensive AI portfolio of tools, training and deployment options for the next-gen AI-powered products and services. It caters to a wide variety of functions like:

 

• Training artificial neural networks on the Intel Nervana cloud.

 

• Optimizing for emerging workloads such as artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality and automated driving with Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

 

• Taking AI to the edge with Movidius vision processing unit (VPU) technology.

 

“The Myriad 2 VPU housed inside the Movidius Neural Compute Stick provides powerful, yet efficient performance – more than 100 gigaflops of performance within a 1W power envelope – to run real-time deep neural networks directly from the device,” said Remi El-Ouazzane, vice president and general manager of Movidius, an Intel company. “This enables a wide range of AI applications to be deployed offline.”

 

As far as machine intelligence development is concerned, it consists of two stages:

 

1) Training an algorithm on large sets of sample data via modern machine learning techniques. 

2) Running the algorithm in an end-application that needs to interpret real-world data.

Movidius Neural Compute Stick can be availed through select distributors for MSRP $79. It will also be available at the conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in Honululu, Hawaii from July 22-25.

Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California that was founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. It is the world’s largest and highest valued semiconductor chip makers based on revenue and is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors: the processors found in most personal computers (PCs).

 

Intel supplies processors for computer systems and manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing.