Bring Intelligence to the Edge with Custom AI Chips

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Thanks to the rise of ML and AI, GPUs are hot. From public cloud vendors to academic research labs, GPUs have become an essential part of computing.
NVIDIA, the largest makers of GPU, enjoys a monopoly in the market. Their GPUs come with software drivers and computing toolkits that can run computing jobs in parallel. CUDA and cuDNN are popular toolkits among AI researchers and enterprise data scientists.

Most of the trained machine learning models run in offline mode at the edge computing layer. This mechanism of running a fully trained machine learning model in end-user devices is called as inferencing.Edge computing is going to drive the adoption of specialized AI chips and accelerators.
Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick

After acquiring Movidius, Intel has packaged Myraid 2 in a USB thumb drive form factor, which is sold as a Neural Compute Stick (NCS). The best thing about NCS is that it works with both x86 and ARM devices. It can be easily plugged into an Intel NUC or a Raspberry Pi for running inferencing. It draws power from the host device without the need of an external power supply.
Machine learning models built on Caffe or TensorFlow can be easily ported to NCS. Intel ships an SDK and tools that help you profile, tune, and deploy existing models on Movidius. The SDK has many samples based on popular neural network architectures such as AlexNet, ImageNet, MobileNet, and Inception.
Horned Sungem AI
Horned Sungem is a Chinese company specializing in AI. The AI development board from Horned Sungem is built for developers, students, hobbyists, and enthusiasts to create their own AI applications with ease.
The device has a USB-C connector that can be plugged into a Raspberry Pi or any other computing device. It has native support for the Raspberry Pi Camera connected through the CSI interface.
Google AIY Vision Kit
Though it may look like a hobby kit based on Google Cardboard project, the AIY Vision Kit packs a punch. It comes with everything needed to build full-blown computer vision applications on a tiny device — Raspberry Pi Zero.
Google has partnered with Intel to build a custom board called the Vision Bonnet. It’s not surprising to see that the board is powered by an Intel Movidius VPU.

Read More..