Intel makes it easier to bring Movidius AI accelerator chip into production

Intel and Aaeon made it easier for hardware companies to build a machine learning accelerator into their products with today's launch of a new circuit board called the AI Core. That board contains a Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit that speeds up execution of AI algorithms while only drawing around a watt of power. That's the same sort of capability hardware makers can get from the Movidius Neural Compute Stick, which looks like a somewhat bulky USB flash drive but offers AI acceleration. Ever since Intel released that hardware last year, it has picked up a following among hardware startups, makers, and developers interested in experimenting with AI. The stick is optimized for speeding up the execution of different types of machine learning algorithms, including convolutional neural networks, which are the backbone of many image recognition systems.