by Angela Guess
George Leopold reports for Datanami, “Google and Movidius, a specialist in low-power machine vision chips, said this week they would collaborate to bring deep learning technology to mobile devices. Google said Wednesday (Jan. 27) it would integrate Movidius processors with the San Mateo, Calif., company’s software development tools. The search giant also said it would contribute to the Movidius neural network technology roadmap. The partners said the agreement would allow Google to deploy its neural computation engine on the Movidius low-power platform as a way of ‘introducing a new way for machine intelligence to run locally on devices.’ Leveraging local computing would allow data to remain on a device and function without Internet access and with fewer latency issues. That capability promises to generate future devices with the ability to more quickly and accurately understand images and audio.”
Leopold goes on, “Working with Movidius means ‘we’re able to expand this technology beyond the datacenter and out into the real world, giving people the benefits of machine intelligence on their personal devices,’ Blaise Agϋera y Arcas, head of Google’s Seattle-based machine intelligence group, noted in a statement. Google said it would use Movidius’ flagship MA2450 chip, the latest version the chipmaker’s Myriad 2 family of ‘vision processors.’ The challenge in embedding deep learning technology into consumer devices ‘boils down to the need for extreme power efficiency, and this is where a deep synthesis between the underlying hardware architecture and the neural compute comes in,’ Movidius CEO Remi El-Ouazzane added.”
photo credit: Google and Movidius