Back in April of2015, Intel released their first Compute Stick. What is essentially a computerin a USB drive, Intel has now released the Neural Compute Stick 2, designed totake on your latest AI and IoT challenges at the edge.
The hardware development platform, allows developers to prototype, tune, and validate deep neural networks. It features the same Movidius vision processing unit (VPU), but is now up to 8x faster than the original, wthout increasing the size. This technology is being used to AI to drones, surveillance cameras, and VR or AR headsets.
If you’re the developer type, you should definitely take a look at Intel’s code samples for Openvino, which promotes some of the potential uses for the NCS2. These include, image classification, stablising videos, face detection, motion detection, camera tampering and even basic lane detection.
Technical Specifications
- Processor: Intel Movidius Myriad X Vision Processing Unit (VPU)
- Supported frameworks: TensorFlow* and Caffe*
- Connectivity: USB 3.0 Type-A
- Dimensions: 2.85 in. x 1.06 in. x 0.55 in. (72.5 mm x 27 mm x 14 mm)
- Operating temperature: 0° C to 40° C
- Compatible operating systems: Ubuntu* 16.04.3 LTS (64 bit), CentOS* 7.4 (64 bit), and Windows® 10 (64 bit)
Price and availability
The NCS2 is availablefrom Amazon for A$72.47, but costs a very steep $50.20 for shipping.
