Movidius (company)

Movidius is a company based in San Mateo, California that designs specialised low-power processor chips for computer vision.

Company History

Movidius was co-founded in in Dublin in 2005 by Dr. Sean Mitchell and David Moloney. Between 2006 and 2016, it raised nearly $90 million in capital funding.

In January, 2016 the company announced a partnership with Google. Movidius has been active in the Google Project Tango project.

Products

Myriad 2

As of February  2016, Movidius's latest Myriad 2 chip is an always-on manycore Vision processing unit that can function on power constrained devices. It is a heterogeneous architecture, combining several 128bit VLIW SIMD processors connected to a multiported Scratchpad memory, a pair of SPARC based processors for control, and a number of fixed function units to accelerate specific video processing tasks (such as small Convolutions and color conversion lookups). It includes camera interface hardware, bypassing the need for external memory buffers when handling realtime image inputs. In terms of software, a Visual programming language allows workflows to be devised, and there is support for OpenCL.

Fathom

Fathom is a USB stick containing a Myriad 2 processor, allowing a vision accelerator to be easily added to devices using ARM processors including PCs, drones, robots, IoT devices and video surveillance for tasks such as identifying people or objects. It can run between 80 and 150 GFLOPS performance at below 1W of power. The company switched from a previous 65nm process to a 28nm one to increase its chip’s efficiency by 20-30x. The Fathom is expected to cost under $100 per unit.

See also

• Vision processing unit
• MPSoC
• Coprocessor
• Convolutional neural network