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Intel acquires Movidius
- hijklmno 10y agoThis 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 10y agoAre you suggesting that such a scenario would be worse than the current situation - nVIdia having a monopoly on DL hardware?
- hijklmno 10y agoNot at all. These startups have to hold out a bit longer. The AI revolution is just beginning. They are selling short.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoHard to do. The funding landscape doesn't really support very long term AI applications without an associated consumer application as proof. Commercializing AI is quite hard actually and most of the AI projects you see are cost centers for the bigs (Alphabet, Apple etc...) Novel ML implementations have a lot of R&D overhead and need a (comparatively) lot of incubation before they are effective. Tying that to a commercial success adds magnitudes of complexity that 99% of Venture doesn't like.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- matt42 10y agoCongratz guys!
- zump 10y agoI'm jelly.
- akavel 10y agoFor those like me, who don't have the slightest idea what is Movidius: based on http://www.movidius.com/technology 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).
- Olap84 10y agoVery strange to see it signed off with Sláinte. I never thought it used much outside of Scotland
- nibnib 10y agoIt's very common in Ireland.
- s_dev 10y agoMovidus is an Irish company not Scottish.
- talideon 10y agoThe 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).
- Olap84 10y agoThanks, good to learn the difference. Graves are a pain on UK keyboards though, I propose they switch!
- talideon 10y agoThere are complicated reasons why that's unlikely to happen, which go back to why some people still use both grave and acute accents Scottish Gaelic (vowel quality, essentially) and why standardising on the grave accent was a more natural choice for SG. It's not a huge deal so long as you use an appropriate keyboard map.
- hughperkins 10y agoWow, 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/ http://www.iwocl.org/attend/sessions/ Interesting times :)
- mtgx 10y agoThat'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.
- jacquesm 10y agoNo, 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.
- petra 10y agoHow cold have the mobile market been won ? When answering take into account that Intel's fab services division couldn't really compete with TSMC (at least on price) .
- anonymousDan 10y agoDoes anyone know if they actually support learning on the chip or does it just execute a pre-trained model efficiently?
- ogrisel 10y agoI would bet that is limited to low-energy inference which is the most important impediment to deploy deep vision models in mobile devices.
- dharma1 10y agoinference 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
- anonymousDan 10y agoBit 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_dev 10y agoIt'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-the-bigger-picture-when-early-stage-tech-firms-sell-out-34158700.html http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/were-missing-out-on...
- anonymousDan 10y agoYou'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.
- samfisher83 10y agoThey use it in the phantom 4. That is a DJI drone.
- trevyn 10y agoAnyone know how much Intel paid?
- robk 10y agoYou can work it out from dfj espirits blog post. They're a publicly traded VC.
- trevyn 10y agoThe 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 10y agothat'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.