Movidius – Intel’s Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence USB pendrive

Artificial Intelligence technology continues to gain ground among the titans of the Internet, but beyond its impressive advances, these technologies need to reach the public in a simple and economical way to reach their full potential. It is at this point that Intel has decided to launch its new Movidius USB pen drive, which includes a visual processing accelerator focused on executing algorithms similar to object detection and facial recognition.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are developing different artificial intelligence projects. The reasons for following this path are many, but one of the most relevant is the reduction of costs. Robots are going to replace most of the jobs currently done by humans, and there are striking examples like the case of a factory in China that eliminated 70 percent of its workforce using just new AI tools. Now, artificial intelligence does not have to be something exclusive to big companies. In fact, the Public intervention will be critical to its evolution, but accessible tools are needed first. That’s what Intel appears to have done with its Movidius Neural Compute USB drive.

Movidius a small new start-up had announced its Fathom deep learning pen drive in April 2016. Five months later, Intel bought Movidius in an agreement with confidential terms. Basically, the internal Myriad 2 chip is an ideal visual processing unit for facial recognition and object detection tasks. Myriad 2 delivers more than 100 gigaFLOPs of performance with just one watt of power!

Initially, the module had a price of $ 99, but Intel’s deep pockets have helped to reduce its cost to $ 79. Also, it will be possible to combine several Movidius modules to further increase the performance, however, there are alternatives like high-end graphics cards, although they are more expensive and consume lots of power. Another possibility is that Movidius and Myriad 2 are integrated into multiple consumer products like smartphones and laptops. Time will tell.

Movidius website – Link