Intel this week initiated an end-of-life plan for its Movidius Neural Compute Stick, which relies on the Myriad 2 VPU. The product will probably be accessible for an additional 12 months and Intel will proceed to supply technical help for the gadget for an additional two years. For builders presently engaged on merchandise powered by the NCS, Intel suggests builders transfer over to the extra superior Myriad X-based Neural Compute Stick 2.
The Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick relies on the Myriad 2 imaginative and prescient compute unit (VPU), and provided as much as 100 GFLOPS/1 TOPS compute capability when it was launched in mid-2017. The USB compute stick was primarily aimed toward builders of low-power merchandise that require a compute imaginative and prescient and/or deep studying accelerator, with builders each prototyping on the NCS and in some instances outright utilizing it in manufacturing gadgets. Since then, Intel launched a significantly extra highly effective Myriad X VPU, which presents 4 occasions greater TOPS efficiency and offering a greater feature-set. In addition, Intel presents quite a lot of imaginative and prescient accelerator merchandise based mostly on Myriad-series VPUs in addition to Arria-series FPGAs accessible in numerous form-factors.
One of the important thing variations between the Intel NCS and the extra superior options like these powered by the Myriad X is that whereas the previous makes use of Intel’s proprietary Movidius Neural Compute SDK, the latter depend on Intel’s distribution of OpenVINO toolkit, which is suitable with open-source OpenVINO industry-standard software program packages.
With new {hardware} and SDKs accessible, and the marketplace for AI ASICs as a complete shortly heating up with extra highly effective opponents, it appears just like the market is winding down for the unique Movidius NCS. As a end result, Intel will stop taking for the {hardware} on October 30, 2019, and can ship all excellent orders April 30, 2020. The firm will proceed to supply technical help for the half until April 30, 2021. As a end result, it appears just like the Movidius NCS could have a significantly shorter lifespan than the Myriad X (which was additionally launched in 2017).
Sources: Intel, Intel
