Intel snaps up Movidius to accelerate its AI and RealSense vision efforts

[Suarez™]

Custom silicon vendor Movidius has attracted a lot of attention for its high-performance, low-power chips that have powered vision applications like Google Tango, as well as making machine learning possible on mobile devices. Now it has received the ultimate compliment. Chip giant Intel has acquired it to help accelerate its RealSense project and other efforts to provide computer vision and deep learning solutions. Intel is expecting to see Movidius technology deployed in drones, robots, and VR headsets — in addition to more traditional mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
The Movidius advantage
Intel announces Movidius acquisitionPower requirements are the traditional Achilles heel of mobile solutions that require substantial computation, with vision and machine learning being two of the most extreme cases. By creating optimized, custom silicon — its Myriad chip family — Movidius has reduced the power needed to run machine learning and vision libraries by well over an order of magnitude compared to a more-general-purpose GPU.