Intel acquires Movidius

http://www.movidius.com/news/ceo-post-september-2016

by scandox • 10 years ago

128 40 10 years ago

movidius.com

matt42• 10 years ago

Congratz guys!

zump• 10 years ago

I'm jelly.

akavel• 10 years ago

For those like me, who don't have the slightest idea what is Movidius: based on http://www.movidius.com/technology and my lay-programmer reading of it, it seems they've designed some kind of CPU/chip specialized for "vision" processing (and/or neural networks).

dharma12• 10 years ago

They do embedded machine learning chips (mostly for vision) - their Myriad chip is in Google Tango and the Phantom 4 drone

cma• 10 years ago

Supposedly in the HTC Vive as well, but right now it seems to only do edge detection...

Olap842• 10 years ago

Very strange to see it signed off with Sláinte. I never thought it used much outside of Scotland

nibnib• 10 years ago

It's very common in Ireland.

s_dev2• 10 years ago

Movidus is an Irish company not Scottish.

talideon2• 10 years ago

The dead giveaway that you're looking at Irish and not Scottish Gaelic is the accent direction: Irish uses acute accents exclusively, whereas Scottish Gaelic uses grave accents exclusively in its standard orthography (though older variants, and some holdouts still use both acute and grave accents).

Olap842• 10 years ago

Thanks, good to learn the difference. Graves are a pain on UK keyboards though, I propose they switch!

hughperkins• 10 years ago

Wow, nervana, and now movidius. Intel are eating a lot of non nvidia machine learning hardware. Theyre also really into opencl, half the talks at this years international workshop on opencl were from intel http://www.iwocl.org/attend/sessions/ Interesting times :)

mtgx• 10 years ago

That's definitely one way of saying Intel is all over the place lately because it has no idea what's "the future."

Many-core CPUs (Phi), FPGA's (Altera), ASICs (Nervana), and now the GPU-like Movidius for machine learning.

You could argue that "they're just experimenting" to see what will take off. But I don't know if paying $17 billion for something (Altera) still fits in the "experiment" category. Was acquiring McAfee antivirus for $8 billion an experiment, too? What if FPGAs aren't the future of machine learning, and they fade out? Does Intel write-off the $17 billion, like it did the $10+ billion it spent on the mobile market.

And it's now trying to make x86 chips, while at the same time making ARM chips better for the competition. I don't think Intel (its current CEO) has any clue about what the company should focus on. Sooner or later, its PC market profits will be squeezed/wasted on these acquisitions, and Intel will need to show something for it.

jacquesm2• 10 years ago

No, it would not need to write off the $17 billion, it would simply spin Altera back out again. It was a successful stand-alone company and FPGAs have plenty of applications that have nothing to do with machine learning to make it a viable segment of the market for a long long time to come.

McAfee is a different matter and the mobile market could have been won but not in the way that Intel hoped.

greendesk• 10 years ago

My first reaction was to ask: 'Why would not these technologies (acquired from Intel-Phi, Altera, Nervana, Movidius) not be successful in their own niches?'

Now I understand that it is easier to coalesce around a champion technology and too hard to navigate around optimising multiple methods. But I'd expect that the differences between them are so large that they would have their own niche implementations.

sgift• 10 years ago

That's definitely one way of saying Intel is all over the place lately because it has no idea what's "the future."

As has no one else. Everyone who said that he knows the future has been proven wrong so far, at most people can hope to try to see a possible future, nothing more.

skynetv2• 10 years ago

Intel has the luxury to bet on multiple things. And I think thats a smart strategy becasue Intel is fighting Nvidia, IBM, Mellanox, ARM & many other competitors on multiple fronts. Betting on "the future" is not a single thing, its exploring multiple technologies that have the potential to become their own version of "the future".

samfisher832• 10 years ago

Trying to project the future is hard. That is why we have index funds. Invest in a bunch of different assets to reduce risk. The main issue is there is some correlation between the companies which screws up the math.

nolok2• 10 years ago

That's why they are rigging the game instead.

They know they won't beat nvidia on CUDA and playing on their turf won't work, so they make sure to win on opencl. They might not know which solution will win on that field but if they have all of them they're sure to hold a "winner".

hijklmno2• 10 years ago

This might lead to duopoly in the market for hardware machine learning chips with Intel and Nvidia competing-with/acquiring new players. This could ultimately stifle innovation like it happened with EDA companies - Synopsys and Cadence.

j15t• 10 years ago

Are you suggesting that such a scenario would be worse than the current situation - nVIdia having a monopoly on DL hardware?

hijklmno2• 10 years ago

Not at all. These startups have to hold out a bit longer. The AI revolution is just beginning. They are selling short.

anonymousDan3• 10 years ago

Does anyone know if they actually support learning on the chip or does it just execute a pre-trained model efficiently?

ogrisel• 10 years ago

I would bet that is limited to low-energy inference which is the most important impediment to deploy deep vision models in mobile devices.

dharma12• 10 years ago

inference only. This is an IoT/robotics play for Intel, combined with RealSense.

The only feasible product at the moment for training large models is NVidia GPUs. Maybe AMD in 1-2 years time, if they decide to wake up and invest in software optimisation for deep learning

anonymousDan3• 10 years ago

Bit disappointing to see another Irish tech company sell out early instead of pushing for a flotation. Can anyone more familiar with the industry comment as to whether there was a realistic chance for them to succeed on their own?

s_dev2• 10 years ago

It's an Irish thing - I'm constantly looking at the Irish tech scene and what we're missing that we can't really compensate for is size. Theres a trend among such Irish tech companies to sell very early.

In Silicon Valley a company will never experience any problems scaling. The entire ecosystem is developed there is a full stack available to cater to whatever the growing firms need - be it talent, investment or other resources.

Ireland is more limited - we cater to startups and large tech companies quite well so the strategy is grow, move to US while medium sized grow again and then return to Ireland when you're Apple or Google and you want an EMEA HQ. We don't cater that well to the medium sized firms in Ireland so it encourages early selling.

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/were-missing-out-on...

anonymousDan3• 10 years ago

You're probably right. I wonder if there are lessons to be learned though from similar sized countries (e.g. Israel, Denmark, Netherlands)? My feeling is that a lot of the issues you raise are valid, but they could be addressed or at least mitigated somewhat.

samfisher832• 10 years ago

They use it in the phantom 4. That is a DJI drone.

trevyn2• 10 years ago

Anyone know how much Intel paid?

robk• 10 years ago

You can work it out from dfj espirits blog post. They're a publicly traded VC.

trevyn2• 10 years ago

The Telegraph says "Intel...has made a conditional offer for Movidius, which will result in an estimated total cash return of approximately £27 million for Draper Esprit." Unclear what their % ownership is though.

Mmrnmhrm• 10 years ago

that's a surprising move. Movidius had a rather unimpressive multiprocessor chip, but managed to get it incredibly hyped.

IMHO, Intel is desperate to buy machine learning hype.

Movidius hit gold with the sell, the company products weren't worth much.

Intel acquires Movidius

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