Movidius Neural Compute Stick 2

The Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 plugs into a USB3 socket and is a development platform for the Movidius Myriad X Vision Processing Unit (VPU). The Myriad X's low power consumption and small package size make it a good fit for IoT, cloud-edge, image processing applications. It is well suited for image classification and inference. It is not intended for training which is best performed in the cloud or on power-hunger, high-end graphics cards. Some potential uses are in drones for obstacle avoidance, object recognition, security surveillance systems, AR/VR headsets, smart homes and smart cameras.

The Myriad X is power efficient using just about 1.5 Watts, but it can still process up to 4 trillion operations per second. It has 16 vector processors optimized for image processing pipelines and computer vision workloads. It has over 20 hardware accelerators to perform tasks such as H.264 decoding and encoding, optical flow and stereo depth perception algorithms.

The Myriad X is available in two IC packages. The NCS2 uses the MA2485 which has an embedded 4 Gbit LPDDR4 memory built into the package. The MA2085 doesn't have embedded memory but has an external LPDDR4 interface that supports up to 16 Gbits. The memory interface is 32-bits wide and can operate at 1600 MHz for date rates up to 12.8 GBytes per second. Both packages are 8.1mm x 8.8mm.

The Myriad X has 16 MIPI lanes and can be connected directly to eight HD cameras. Note, the NCS2 does NOT bring out any MIPI lanes, so all video and data is from the USB3 plug. I would love a Myriad X development board with a MIPI connector.