Neural Accelerator Battle Begins

Movidius to launch AI accelerator in a USB stick

Junko Yoshida, EETimes
7/21/2017 00:01 AM EDT

PARIS — The embedded market for neural network accelerators is heating up, with more systems — ranging from smart speakers and drones to light bulbs — poised to run neural networks locally instead of going back to the cloud for computation.

In an interview with EE Times, Remi El-Ouazzane, vice president and general manager of Movidius, defined the growing trend as “a race for making things smart and autonomous.”

Movidius, an Intel company, launched Thursday (July 20) a self-contained AI accelerator in the form of a USB stick. Called Movidius Neural Compute Stick, it is designed to plug simply into Raspberry Pi or X86 PCs. The Neural Compute Stick makes it easier for university researchers, independent software developers and tinkerers to compile, tune and accelerate deep learning applications for embedded systems, said El-Ouazzane.

Movidius, acquired by Intel last fall and now a part of Intel’s New Technology Group, developed Myriad 2 VPU, the industry’s first always-on vision processor. El-Ouazzane said his ultimate goal in rolling out the stick is to make Movidius VPU “a reference architecture” for neural networks running at the edge.

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