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Intel Launches Movidius Neural Compute Stick: 'Deep Learning and AI' On a $79 USB Stick (anandtech.com)
Nate Oh, writing for AnandTech: Today Intel subsidiary Movidius is launching their Neural Compute Stick (NCS), a version of which was showcased earlier this year at CES 2017. The Movidius NCS adds to Intel's deep learning and AI development portfolio, building off of Movidius' April 2016 launch of the Fathom NCS and Intel's later acquisition of Movidius itself in September 2016. As Intel states, the Movidius NCS is "the world's first self-contained AI accelerator in a USB format," and is designed to allow host devices to process deep neural networks natively -- or in other words, at the edge. In turn, this provides developers and researchers with a low power and low cost method to develop and optimize various offline AI applications. Movidius's NCS is powered by their Myriad 2 vision processing unit (VPU), and, according to the company, can reach over 100 GFLOPs of performance within an nominal 1W of power consumption. Under the hood, the Movidius NCS works by translating a standard, trained Caffe-based convolutional neural network (CNN) into an embedded neural network that then runs on the VPU. In production workloads, the NCS can be used as a discrete accelerator for speeding up or offloading neural network tasks. Otherwise for development workloads, the company offers several developer-centric features, including layer-by-layer neural networks metrics to allow developers to analyze and optimize performance and power, and validation scripts to allow developers to compare the output of the NCS against the original PC model in order to ensure the accuracy of the NCS's model. According to Gary Brown, VP of Marketing at Movidius, this 'Acceleration mode' is one of several features that differentiate the Movidius NCS from the Fathom NCS. The Movidius NCS also comes with a new "Multi-Stick mode" that allows multiple sticks in one host to work in conjunction in offloading work from the CPU. For multiple stick configurations, Movidius claims that they have confirmed linear performance increases up to 4 sticks in lab tests, and are currently validating 6 and 8 stick configurations. Importantly, the company believes that there is no theoretical maximum, and they expect that they can achieve similar linear behavior for more devices. Though ultimately scalability will depend at least somewhat with the neural network itself, and developers trying to use the feature will want to play around with it to determine how well they can reasonably scale. As for the technical specifications, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick features a 4Gb LPDDR3 on-chip memory, and a USB 3.0 Type A interface.
What does it actually DO?!
Because I've heard it's the thickness of the AI stick that counts, not the length.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So if I bought this as a gift for someone what do you do with it?
Get ready for more half-assed, not-ready-for-prime-time, pseudo-AI (artificially flavored)©.
Discontinued and abandoned in 1-2 years, count on it.
@Intel just stop wasting our time.
Now if they can only do the same with FOX and put some logic into their reporting. AI and fake news, now there is a scary concept.
Any advances in computing will be used for mining crypto currency instead of its intended purpose.
CNN = Fake News!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
This seems more like a test bed for someone who wants to play with Caffe without spending big bucks on a fast GPU, or an engineer who wants to take the Intel Myriad 2 VPU for a test drive without having to build anything. Both of them are perfectly valid uses, and I'm considering buying one. Otherwise this is much like the USB-based coin miners: fun and educational, but don't expect to use them for any real-world [proof of] work.
on a stick. According to a video you plug it into a raspberry pi with a video camera and it can recognize items places in front of a camera. As long as it's a doll, cup or hand.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
... our new Movidius USB overlords.
The grey light weight font on a white background can not be read comfortably by my 62 yr eyes. Let me configure the entry so I can read it. My phones LG K540 & ZTE Z983
So I was interested in what drives this thing, the Myriad 2 VPU and found out this is right up Intel's ally because it's proprietary from top to bottom. Everything needs software only they can provide and naturally comes with conditions. I found a presentation which clearly shows what their priorities are.
Their big claims to fame:
- 8+ years of heritage. Close to $60M invested into technology development
- Proven architecture. 100% internally developed. Strong IP position
Buy into the lock-in now! -_-
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Seems most people don't understand what this is doing. It looks like it is using Caffe standard neural network libraries. It mentions 'limited' layer support, but not by how much. Specifically it says it will support convolutional neural networks, which are decent image detectors. They could be used for object detection, handwriting recognition, etc.
:-)
You then cross compile your network using their toolkit to run on this device, and much like GPUs and tensorflow, you get high powered processing of your network. When married with a low power CPU, this could allow you to do CNN processing on devices that were not otherwise up to the task.
That said, exactly how performant this is remains to be seen. Although at only $80, it is a pretty cheap experiment and somewhat interesting as an idea.
I wonder if you can plug it into your Edison, though?
Maybe GPU prices can come back down to earth...
... beowulf cluster of these imagines YOU!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Boy, oh, boy! I'd like to plug one of these into my sex robot. She will learn all the tricks I like!
There are many of these announcements where I just file the URL in my searchable wiki, to see if the day ever arrives where the technology is mentioned in a comprehensible, second context.
Cost of comprehending the original market-speak .GT. received utility modulo a not-improbable gaping ocean rift.
Footnote
Atlantis just called. STOP SENDING IoT! You've nearly buckled the entire plate, and our mermaids are all becoming discouraged and refusing to tail dig.
n/t
Still kinda neat, but I'll hold off until games can use it.