Intel Corp. has found a creative use for the artificial intelligence technology that it obtained through the acquisition of Movidius Ltd. last year.

At a trade conference in Hawaii today, the chip maker is showcasing a thumb drive called the Movidius Neural Compute Stick that can be plugged into any device with a USB port to run computer vision models. It’s based on a prototype model dubbed the Fathom that the startup unveiled a few months before Intel swooped in. The Verge reported that the original plastic chassis has been replaced with an aluminum design and the suggested retail price is down to $79, but the silicon inside remains unchanged.

The thumb drive is powered by a system-on-chip that Movidius engineered specifically for processing media content. Dubbed the Myriad 2, it can provide up to 100 gigaflops of computational power while consuming just a single watt. The hardware has been described as capable of handling input from as many as six high-definition cameras at once.

Intel’s main target audience for the device is developers. Perhaps the biggest selling point is that the Movidius Neural Compute Stick has the potential to be cheaper than prototyping computer vision models in the cloud, where hardware resources are charged by the hour. That can add up significantly over time for users who work with AI on a regular basis. 

On the flip side, the cloud offers access to incomparably more processing power than a humble USB stick, but the kind of projects that a developer would run on a local device usually aren’t too resource-intensive. And in cases when an algorithm does require some extra performance, Intel says that multiple thumb drives may be chained together.

Intel has also equipped the Movidius Neural Compute Stick with specialized firmware designed to ease day-to-day usage. When a user sets up their model, the drive will automatically convert the code into a form that can be efficiently executed by the silicon inside. This feature is complemented by monitoring tools for measuring neural networks’ performance and accuracy.  

The Movidius Neural Compute Stick is available immediately from select Intel partners. Only the Caffe machine learning framework is supported on launch, but there’s a good chance that the chip maker will add other engines to the roster if there’s enough demand.

Image: Intel