Movidius


Movidius is a company based in San Mateo, California that designs specialised low-power processor chips for computer vision. The company was acquired by Intel in September 2016.

Company history

Movidius was co-founded in Dublin in 2005 by Sean Mitchell and David Moloney. Between 2006 and 2016, it raised nearly $90 million in capital funding. In May, 2013 the company appointed Remi El-Ouazzane as CEO. In January, 2016 the company announced a partnership with Google. Movidius has been active in the Google Project Tango project. Movidius announced a planned acquisition by Intel in September 2016.

Products

The company's Myriad 2 chip is an always-on manycore vision processing unit that can function on power-constrained devices. The Fathom is a USB stick containing a Myriad 2 processor, allowing a vision accelerator to be added to devices using ARM processors including PCs, drones, robots, IoT devices and video surveillance for tasks such as identifying people or objects. It can run at between 80 and 150 GFLOPS on little more than 1W of power.
Intel's Myriad X VPU is the third generation and most advanced VPU from Movidius, an Intel company. Intel's Myriad X VPU is the first of its class to feature the Neural Compute Engine—a dedicated hardware accelerator for deep neural network deep-learning inferences. The Neural Compute Engine in conjunction with the 16 SHAVE cores and an ultra-high throughput intelligent memory fabric makes Myriad X a strong option for on-device deep neural networks and computer vision applications. Intel's Myriad X VPU has received additional upgrades to imaging and vision engines including additional programmable SHAVE cores, upgraded and expanded vision accelerators, and a new native 4K image processor pipeline with support for up to 8 HD sensors connecting directly to the VPU. As with Myriad 2, the Myriad X VPU is programmable via the Myriad Development Kit which includes all necessary development tools, frameworks and APIs to implement custom vision, imaging and deep neural network workloads on the chip.

Neural Compute Stick

The Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick is a tiny fanless deep-learning device that can be used to learn AI programming at the edge. NCS is powered by the same low-power, high-performance Intel Movidius Vision Processing Unit that can be found in millions of smart security cameras, gesture-controlled drones, industrial machine vision equipment, and more. Supported frameworks are TensorFlow and Caffe.
On 14 November 2018, the company announced the latest version of NCS, marketed as "Neural Compute Stick 2" at the AI DevCon event in Beijing.

Uses

camera uses Myriad 2 VPU.
The Intel RealSense Tracking Camera T265 is another product that uses the Myriad 2.