Movidius Introduces Fathom, A Deep-learning Accelerator On A USB Stick

It's not often a unique product shows up in our email and news feeds, but we became curious over something a little different today: a USB compute module for neural networks and machine learning. Movidius' new Fathom Neural Compute Stick is an ultra-low power processor featuring a Myriad 2 VPU (vision processing unit), providing up to 150 GFLOPS of compute for about 1 Watt of power. Neural networks and machine learning have fascinated people for a long time; teaching machines and computers to think rather than simply'do'. The problem is that it's extremely difficult; not just from a hardware perspective (people aren't binary), but from an academic and psychological perspective too; the how we think. Instead of writing code that goes through images or live camera feeds, doing edge detection, writing more algorithms to define shapes and generally teach the computer what it needs to do (explicitly), neural networks are a way to teach a computer to teach itself – often creating systems that are faster and more accurate than the hand-coded method.