Intel Launches $79 Deep Learning AI USB Stick

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Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11649/intel-launches-movidius-neural-compute-stick

 

 

Movidius, a now-subsidiary of Intel (which they purchased in September last year following the release of their previous stick) is ready to sell their new compute stick (first demoed at CES this year) to the world.

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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

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Movidius's NCS is powered by their Myriad 2 [...] (VPU), and, [...] can reach over 100 GFLOPs of performance within an nominal 1W of power consumption.

Impressive stats!  I will admit I do not fully understand this but it sounds like some sort of ASIC, but perhaps not quite as "specific".

 

You can see below how the stats have improved from the version they launched shortly before being purchased my Intel (right) to the new one they are launching today (left)

 

 

Ultimately, it's an interesting product.  While I suppose it could be handy to have such an advanced device like this that draws so little power and takes so little space (not to mention is so cheap) ready to plug in at a moment's notice, I can't help but feel like anyone who is really into this stuff has already - and will continue to - invest heavily in far more heavy duty hardware, leaving me to wonder who will really use this.

 

What do you think?

[Guest]

But can it run... yeah I guess not

[ARikozuM]

I can haz Skynet?

[vanished]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

I can haz Skynet?

With this I suppose you could  

[ARikozuM]

Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

With this I suppose you could  

Hopefully, it gives me Duran Duran Radio on Pandora rather than T-101 on my @$$.

[vanished]

Does anyone know anyone here on the forums that's well-versed in the deep learning, AI field?  It wouldn't hurt to get a simplified explanation of what is actually going on and what it can do (and why it matters)  

[The Sloth]

it has the capability for basic AI development, that's really impressive. 

 

"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." 

 

44 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I can't help but feel like anyone who is really into this stuff has already - and will continue to - invest heavily in far more heavy duty hardware, leaving me to wonder who will really use this.

this is more for people getting into this kind of stuff or company to scale up on it 

 

 

 

 

this is what you can do with a pi and some optimization 

really hope more people get into it 

a pi detecting objects 

 

https://svds.com/tensorflow-image-recognition-raspberry-pi/

 

if you are interested learning about AL and want to try it at home look at TensorFlow.

[rn8686]

Perhaps Nvidia game assist is realistic after all. 

[Bleedingyamato]

56 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

With this I suppose you could  

What exactly does this do?/what is it for?    I'm confused.  ?

[vanished]

13 minutes ago, Bleedingyamato said:

What exactly does this do?/what is it for?    I'm confused.  ?

It's for creating skynet /s

It's for AI development, as mentioned above.  My question was who specifically would be interested, and I guess it's actually targeted at home users and small businesses that are looking to get into it for cheap.  I never realized there was that much of a market

[The Sloth]

16 minutes ago, Bleedingyamato said:

What exactly does this do?/what is it for?    I'm confused.  ?

use TensorFlow to make an AI that is really good at Mario world

 

[BuckGup]

I have been following Tensor flow for awhile and it's brilliant 

[Jito463]

2 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

2 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

I can haz Skynet?

With this I suppose you could  

So......budget Skynet.  Does that mean it will only mildly irritate most of humanity, instead of killing/enslaving us?

[RGProductions]

Am i the only one who has no idea what deep learning is?

[ARikozuM]

3 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

So......budget Skynet.  Does that mean it will only mildly irritate most of humanity, instead of killing/enslaving us?

It'll use T-101's that shop at airsoft and Nerf stores only. It's primary purpose is to... yep, mildly irritate. Unless it gets a PolarStar... then it just ruins everything...

3 minutes ago, RGProductions said:

Am i the only one who has no idea what deep learning is?

@Bleedingyamato is the second who doesn't know.

[vanished]

13 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

So......budget Skynet.  Does that mean it will only mildly irritate most of humanity, instead of killing/enslaving us?

Nah, that's Windows 10  

[Bleedingyamato]

25 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

@Bleedingyamato is the second who doesn't know.

You understand me so well.  ?

 

(You're right btw.  lol)

[Bleedingyamato]

1 hour ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

It's for creating skynet /s

It's for AI development, as mentioned above.  My question was who specifically would be interested, and I guess it's actually targeted at home users and small businesses that are looking to get into it for cheap.  I never realized there was that much of a market

Idk anything about AI stuff but I wouldn't have thought that people would try to mske one at home with something like this.  

 

1 hour ago, nerdslayer1 said:

use TensorFlow to make an AI that is really good at Mario world

 

What's TensorFlow?

 

That's both cool and scary that an AI can be made to eventually become good at Mario.  Those games are deceptively hard.  No joke.  

[themctipers]

someone make this into a realtime disk encryption thing for everything and your os drive with all those flops! 

[randomhkkid]

Disappointing to see the removal of TensorFlow and 8-bit FP in the newer version.

[Nicnac]

how is this better than gpu acceleration?

[LegendKillerRG]

7 minutes ago, Nicnac said:

how is this better than gpu acceleration?

GPU do best in FP32 but except for FP64/FP16, a 1080Ti does 100-200GFLOPS(11.3TFLOPS in FP32 which is the acceleration you're talking about). Where as this USB can do over 100GFLOPS on FP16 on 1w of power and only cost $80.

[Nicnac]

36 minutes ago, LegendKillerRG said:

GPU do best in FP32 but except for FP64/FP16, a 1080Ti does 100-200GFLOPS(11.3TFLOPS in FP32 which is the acceleration you're talking about). Where as this USB can do over 100GFLOPS on FP16 on 1w of power and only cost $80.

I see, thanks for the info!

[Bananasplit_00]

1 hour ago, Jito463 said:

So......budget Skynet.  Does that mean it will only mildly irritate most of humanity, instead of killing/enslaving us?

Nah it will probably just become sentient and start making claims about how thermal paste is better then solder under the IHS... 

[Bananasplit_00]

I kinda want one, Duknow what I'd use it for but I want one