Windows 10: Intel Unveils Neural Compute Stick 2 for Smarter AI Edge Devices

Brink · Nov 14, 2018

What’s New: Intel is hosting its first artificial intelligence (AI) developer conference in Beijing on Nov. 14 and 15. The company kicked off the event with the introduction of the Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2 (Intel NCS 2) designed to build smarter AI algorithms and for prototyping computer vision at the network edge. Based on the Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ X vision processing unit (VPU) and supported by the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit, the Intel NCS 2 affordably speeds the development of deep neural networks inference applications while delivering a performance boost over the previous generation neural compute stick. The Intel NCS 2 enables deep neural network testing, tuning and prototyping, so developers can go from prototyping into production leveraging a range of Intel vision accelerator form factors in real-world applications.
“The first-generation Intel Neural Compute Stick sparked an entire community of AI developers into action with a form factor and price that didn’t exist before. We’re excited to see what the community creates next with the strong enhancement to compute power enabled with the new Intel Neural Compute Stick 2.”

–Naveen Rao, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the AI Products Group
What It Does: Bringing computer vision and AI to Internet of Things (IoT) and edge device prototypes is easy with the enhanced capabilities of the Intel NCS 2. For developers working on a smart camera, a drone, an industrial robot or the next must-have smart home device, the Intel NCS 2 offers what’s needed to prototype faster and smarter.

What looks like a standard USB thumb drive hides much more inside. The Intel NCS 2 is powered by the latest generation of Intel VPU – the Intel Movidius Myriad X VPU. This is the first to feature a neural compute engine – a dedicated hardware neural network inference accelerator delivering additional performance. Combined with the Intel Distribution of the OpenVINO toolkit supporting more networks, the Intel NCS 2 offers developers greater prototyping flexibility. Additionally, thanks to the Intel® AI: In Production ecosystem, developers can now port their Intel NCS 2 prototypes to other form factors and productize their designs.

How It Works: With a laptop and the Intel NCS 2, developers can have their AI and computer vision applications up and running in minutes. The Intel NCS 2 runs on a standard USB 3.0 port and requires no additional hardware, enabling users to seamlessly convert and then deploy PC-trained models to a wide range of devices natively and without internet or cloud connectivity.

The first-generation Intel NCS, launched in July 2017, has fueled a community of tens of thousands of developers, has been featured in more than 700 developer videos and has been utilized in dozens of research papers. Now with greater performance in the NCS 2, Intel is empowering the AI community to create even more ambitious applications.

What is Happening at Intel AI DevCon Beijing: More than 1,000 AI developers, researchers and Intel customers and supporters are gathering at Intel® AI DevCon Beijing to collaborate on the advancement of AI and hear the latest updates on Intel’s AI portfolio of technologies, including:

Cascade Lake, a future Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor that will introduce Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory and a set of new AI features called Intel DL Boost. This embedded AI accelerator is expected to speed deep learning inference workloads, with enhanced image recognition compared with current Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Cascade Lake is targeted to ship this year and ramp in 2019.

Intel’s Vision Accelerator Design Products targeted at AI inference and analytics performance on edge devices come in two forms: one that features an array of Intel Movidius VPUs and one built on the high-performance Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA. The accelerator solutions build on the OpenVINO toolkit that provides developers with improved neural network performance on a variety of Intel products and helps them further unlock cost-effective, real-time image analysis and intelligence within their IoT devices.

Spring Crest is the Intel® Nervana™ Neural Network Processor (NNP) that will be available in the market in 2019. The Intel Nervana NNP family leverages compute characteristics specific for AI deep learning, such as dense matrix multiplies and custom interconnects for parallelism.

More Context: Users Put Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick to Real-Life Uses | New Intel Vision Accelerator Solutions Speed Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence on Edge Devices| Introducing Myriad X: Unleashing AI at the Edge|Beyond the CPU or GPU: Why Enterprise-Scale Artificial Intelligence Requires a More Holistic Approach | Intel Democratizes Deep Learning Application Development with Launch of Movidius Neural Compute Stick |Artificial Intelligence at Intel

[youtube]VqDLGI2HOJE[/youtube]

[youtube]7DzJBIEFPeY[/youtube]
Click to expand...

Source: Intel Unveils the Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 at Intel AI Devcon Beijing for Building Smarter AI Edge Devices | Intel Newsroom

:)

Brink · Nov 14, 2018

Intel & Microsoft Enable AI Inference at Edge with Intel Movidius VDU

Today during Windows Developer Day, Microsoft announced Windows* ML, which enables developers to perform machine learning tasks in the Windows OS. Windows ML efficiently uses hardware for any given artificial intelligence (AI) workload and intelligently distributes work across multiple hardware types – now including Intel Vision Processing Units (VPU). The Intel VPU, a purpose-built chip for accelerating AI workloads at the edge, will allow developers to build and deploy the next generation of deep neural network applications on Windows clients.

Press Kit: Intel Movidius

The Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ X VPU is the industry’s first system-on-chip shipping with a dedicated neural compute engine for hardware acceleration of deep learning inference at the edge. This third-generation VPU from Intel is specifically designed to run deep neural networks at high speed and low power to offload specific AI tasks from burdening other hardware.

By implementing support for Intel’s VPU in Windows ML, Microsoft is providing independent software vendors the option of a dedicated deep learning inference solution, freeing up traditional hardware for other workloads or reducing the overall system power consumption without requiring custom code. The Windows ML and Intel VPU combination has the potential to enable more intelligent client applications and core OS features, such as personal assistants, enhanced biometric security, smart music, and photo search and recognition.

“Intel Movidius VPU technology will deliver increasingly sophisticated AI experiences for the hundreds of millions of Microsoft users worldwide,” said Intel’s Remi El-Ouazzane, Intel vice president and general manager of Intel Movidius. “This is just the latest example of how Intel is accelerating the promise of bringing AI from the data center to edge devices through our high-performance, low-power vision processor technology.”

“We’re excited to work closely with Intel to enable developers around the world to build engaging and magical AI-powered experiences using Windows ML and the Intel Movidius VPU,” said Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president, Windows Developer Platform, Microsoft.
Click to expand...

Source: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/inte...ts-windows-ml/

Brink · Nov 14, 2018

Intel Announces First Neural Network Processor

Today I spoke at the WSJDLive global technology conference about cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, two nascent areas that I believe will be transformative to the industry and world. These systems also offer tremendous market opportunity and are on a trajectory to reach $46 billion in industry revenue by 20201. At Intel, we’re pioneering in these areas with research and investments in hardware, data algorithms and analytics, acquisitions, and technology advancements.

As part of this, today we announced that Intel will ship the industry’s first silicon for neural network processing, the Intel® Nervana™ Neural Network Processor (NNP), before the end of this year. We are thrilled to have Facebook in close collaboration sharing its technical insights as we bring this new generation of AI hardware to market.

More: Artificial Intelligence (Press Kit) | Intel Nervana Neural Network Processor (Intel Chip Chat Podcast)

The Intel Nervana NNP promises to revolutionize AI computing across myriad industries. Using Intel Nervana technology, companies will be able to develop entirely new classes of AI applications that maximize the amount of data processed and enable customers to find greater insights – transforming their businesses. Examples include:

Health care: AI will allow for earlier diagnosis and greater accuracy, helping make the impossible possible by advancing research on cancer, Parkinson’s disease and other brain disorders.

Social media: Providers will be able to deliver a more personalized experience to their customers and offer more targeted reach to their advertisers.

Automotive: The accelerated learning delivered in this new platform brings us another step closer to putting autonomous vehicles on the road.

Weather: Consider the immense data required to understand movement, wind speeds, water temperatures and other factors that decide a hurricane’s path. Having a processor that takes better advantage of data inputs could improve predictions on how subtle climate shifts may increase hurricanes in different geographies.

We have multiple generations of Intel Nervana NNP products in the pipeline that will deliver higher performance and enable new levels of scalability for AI models. This puts us on track to exceed the goal we set last year of achieving 100 times greater AI performance by 2020.

In addition to advancing AI today, Intel is also investing in frontier technologies that will be needed for other large-scale computing applications of the future. Among these technologies, we’re achieving research breakthroughs in neuromorphic and quantum computing.

Neuromorphic chips are inspired by the human brain, which will help computers make decisions based on patterns and associations. Intel recently announced our first-of-its-kind self-learning neuromorphic test chip, which uses data to learn and make inferences, gets smarter over time, and does not need to be trained in the traditional way. The potential benefits from self-learning chips are limitless as these types of devices can learn to perform the most complex cognitive tasks, such as interpreting critical cardiac rhythms, detecting anomalies to prevent cyberhacking and composing music.

Quantum computers have the potential to be powerful computers harnessing the unique capabilities of a large number of qubits (quantum bits), as opposed to binary bits, to perform exponentially more calculations in parallel. This will enable quantum computers to tackle problems conventional computers can’t handle, such as simulating nature to advance research in chemistry, materials science and molecular modeling – creating a room temperature superconductor or discovering new drugs.

Last week, we announced a 17-qubit superconducting test chip delivered to QuTech*, our quantum research partner in the Netherlands. The delivery of this chip demonstrates the fast progress Intel and QuTech are making in researching and developing a working quantum computing system. In fact, we expect to deliver a 49-qubit chip by the end of this year.

Intel’s research and forward-thinking teams have led to industry advancements throughout the history of our company. We are well on our way to unlocking the potential of AI and paving a path to new forms of computing. It will be amazing to watch the industry transform as our latest research and compute breakthroughs continue to mature.

Brian Krzanich is the chief executive officer of Intel Corporation.

» Download images (ZIP, 3 MB)

1IDC: “Worldwide Semiannual Cognitive Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide,” April 3, 2017.
Click to expand...

Source: Intel Pioneers New Technologies to Advance Artificial Intelligence | Intel Newsroom

Chino · Nov 14, 2018

The Laceli AI Compute Stick is Here to Compete Against Intel's Movidius

Gyrfalcon Technology Inc, an emerging AI chip maker in Silicon Valley, CA, launches its Laceli AI Compute Stick after Intel Movidius announced its deep learning Neural Compute Stick in July of last year. With the company's first ultra-low power, high performance AI processor Lightspeeur 2801S, the Laceli AI Compute Stick runs a 2.8 TOPS performance within 0.3 Watt of power, which is 90 times more efficient than the Movidius USB Stick (0.1 TOPS within 1 Watt of power.)

Lightspeeur is based on Gyrfalcon Technology Inc's APiM architecture, which uses memory as the AI processing unit. This eliminates the huge data movement that results in high power consumption. The architecture features true, on-chip parallelism, in situ computing, and eliminates memory bottlenecks. It has roughly 28,000 parallel computing cores and does not require external memory for AI inference.

The standard USB 3.0 Stick can be connected to a range of devices such as PCs, laptops and mobile phones, and can enhance their image-based deep learning capabilities to unprecedented levels without them having to tap into a cloud based system. With Caffe and TensorFlow support, the Stick enables various application development backgrounds.

Powered by a specialized AI Processor, Laceli can be used in many smart applications such as image and video recognition, natural speech understanding, natural language processing, and day-to-day AI applications.

The Laceli AI Compute Stick will be shown in public for the first time in January 2018 at CES 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Lightspeeur 2810S is in production at the moment and is available today to qualified customers.

Windows 10: Intel Unveils Neural Compute Stick 2 for Smarter AI Edge Devices

Intel Unveils Neural Compute Stick 2 for Smarter AI Edge Devices

Intel Unveils Neural Compute Stick 2 for Smarter AI Edge Devices

Intel Unveils Neural Compute Stick 2 for Smarter AI Edge Devices

Intel Unveils Neural Compute Stick 2 for Smarter AI Edge Devices - Similar Threads - Intel Unveils Neural

Kiano Slimstick (Atom Z3735F, similar to early Intel Compute Stick) - Edge video...

Intel Compute Stick (stck1a32wfc) BSOD - acpi_bios_error

Intel Compute Stick, first BSOD

Intel Compute Stick - Installing Windows

Intel & Microsoft Enable AI Inference at Edge with Intel Movidius VDU

Intel Unveils the Intel XMM 7560 LTE Modem

Intel Announces First Neural Network Processor

Intel launched the Intel AI Builders Program

Microsoft unveils Project Brainwave for real-time AI