This week, Intel announced the end-of-life of the Movidius Neural Compute Stick version 2, a USB-mounted miniature device equipped with a Myriad 2 machine vision processor (VPU). The product will be available for about a year and technical support will be provided for another two years. However, developers using the Movidius Neural Compute Stick are advised to switch to the second version of the Neural Compute Stick based on the newer Myriad X XNUMX processor.
Based on the Myriad 2 processor, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick was released in mid-2017 and offered 100 Gflops computing performance at a low power consumption of 1 watt. This small USB-mounted device was intended for developers with an interest in the field of artificial intelligence. It made it possible to quickly and conveniently prototype, profile, and tune flows in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for the needs of end applications.
However, since the release of the Movidius Neural Compute Stick, there have been better alternatives on the market. For example, based on the newer Myriad X 2 VPU, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick 2 has many times better performance and a richer feature set. One of the key differences between the Neural Compute Stick and more advanced solutions such as those based on the Myriad X 2 is that while the first version of the device relied on Intel's own Movidius Neural Compute SDK software library, subsequent solutions run through Intel OpenVINO toolkit is a common set of libraries, optimization tools, and information resources for developing machine vision and deep learning.
Thus, there is no doubt that the Movidius Neural Compute Stick is obsolete and the end of its life cycle with the end of orders at the end of October this year is quite natural.
Source: 3dnews.ru