Movidius Ltd. was a company based in

San Mateo, California San Mateo ( ) is the most populous city in San Mateo County, California, United States, on the San Francisco Peninsula. It is part of the San Francisco Bay Area metropolitan region, and is located about south of San Francisco. San Mateo border ...

, that designed

low-power processor Low-power electronics are electronics designed to consume less electric power, electrical power than usual, often at some expense. For example, notebook processors usually consume less power than their Desktop computer, desktop counterparts, at ...

chips ''CHiPs'' is an American crime drama television series created by Rick Rosner and originally aired on NBC from September 15, 1977, to May 1, 1983. After the final first-run telecast on NBC in May 1983, the series went into reruns on Sundays fr ...

for

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

. The company was acquired by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

in September 2016, who continues to sell the company's products under the Movidius line.

Company history

Movidius was co-founded in 2005 by Sean Mitchell, David Moloney, and Val Muresan in

Dublin, Ireland Dublin is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. Situated on Dublin Bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, and is bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, pa ...

. 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 Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. Movidius has been active in Google's Project Tango, and in September 2016 it was announced that

planned to acquire the company.

Products

Myriad 2

The company's Myriad 2 chip is a 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,

robot A robot is a machine—especially one Computer program, programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions Automation, automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the robot control, co ...

s, IoT devices and

video surveillance Closed-circuit television (CCTV), also known as video surveillance, is the use of closed-circuit television cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place on a limited set of monitors. It differs from broadcast television in that the signal ...

for tasks such as identifying people or objects. It can run at between 80 and 150 G

FLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

on 1W of power.

Myriad X

Intel's Myriad X VPU ( vision processing unit) is the third generation VPU from Movidius. It uses a Neural Compute Engine, a dedicated hardware accelerator—for neural network deep-learning inferences.

Neural Compute Stick

The Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick (NCS) is a compact device designed to facilitate the development of deep learning applications at the network edge. It utilizes the Intel Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit (VPU), which is also found in various smart devices like security cameras, gesture-controlled drones, and industrial machine vision systems. The NCS supports frameworks such as

TensorFlow TensorFlow is a Library (computing), software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks, but is used mainly for Types of artificial neural networks#Training, training and Statistical infer ...

and Caffe for developing neural network models. The second iteration, the Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 (NCS 2), was introduced on November 14, 2018, at the AI DevCon event in Beijing. This version is based on the Myriad X VPU, which significantly improves performance over the original, providing up to eight times the processing capability for AI inference tasks. The NCS 2 is designed to work seamlessly with the Intel Distribution of

OpenVINO OpenVINO is an open-source software toolkit for optimizing and deploying deep learning models. It enables programmers to develop scalable and efficient AI solutions with relatively few lines of code. It supports several popular model formats and ...

toolkit, which helps developers optimize and deploy their models efficiently. The NCS connects to a host machine via a USB interface, allowing developers to rapidly prototype and deploy

deep neural network Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural network (machine learning), neural networks to perform tasks such as Statistical classification, classification, Regression analysis, regression, and re ...

applications without the need for cloud connectivity. This makes it suitable for various real-time, low-power applications where efficient on-device processing is essential.

Uses

* Google Clips camera uses Myriad 2 VPU. * The Intel RealSense Tracking Camera T265 uses the Myriad 2. * In 2016, Mavic incorporated the Myriad 2 VPU in all its consumer drones. * The Ryze Tello affordable programmable drone, licensing Mavic Software, uses the Myriad 2 VPU. * ComBox Technology uses Myriad X i
ComBox x64 PCIe Blad board
for CNN inference in DC.

References

{{reflist OpenCL compute devices Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Companies based in San Mateo, California Technology companies established in 2005 Intel acquisitions 2016 mergers and acquisitions Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States