
Intel acquires Movidius - scandox
http://www.movidius.com/news/ceo-post-september-2016
======
hughperkins
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/](http://www.iwocl.org/attend/sessions/)
Interesting times :)

~~~
mtgx
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
petra
How 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) .

~~~
jacquesm
By letting go of the x86 instruction set. But that's something I figure Intel
will do in 2300 or so.

~~~
ddalex
The instruction set is irrelevant. In modern CPU, decoding the X86_64
instruction set takes about 80K transistors. Compare this with 1,175 millions
transistor packed into a Skylake - it does not even factor.

What is relevant is the ability to compute within a power envelope. Intel
didn't try to scale down its new designs for mobile. It tried to scale up old
cores with new technology - something that they got good at during the tick-
tock development flow. And guess what, new core designs beat process
improvement. Intel eventually reached same power envelopes as ARM with more
computing power, and better overall performance due to better memory bus
access. But it reaches them after 8-12 months after Qualcomm does, so it's a
full generation behind in terms of mobile development.

Specific to this acquisition, Movidius packs 150 Gflops under 4W of power.
Skylake packs 100Gflops under 120W of power. The difference here is more than
2 degrees of magnitude. Moving the designs to the new Intel processes should
cover another significant improvement. So that's what's going on.

~~~
koytch
> Specific to this acquisition, Movidius packs 150 Gflops under 4W of power.
> Skylake packs 100Gflops under 120W of power. The difference here is more
> than 2 degrees of magnitude. Moving the designs to the new Intel processes
> should cover another significant improvement. So that's what's going on.

Where did you get the measurements? Link please.

M2 to Skylake is like apples to oranges. The RISC cores are based on Leon, and
then you have 12 SHAVEs/VLIW cores, which are very good at number crunching
and GPU/DSP-like tasks, but they are not really general purpose CPUs as such.
I think you should exclude them from your comparison.

Anyway, good for Movidius, I wish 'em all the best.

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akavel
For 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).

~~~
dharma1
They do embedded machine learning chips (mostly for vision) - their Myriad
chip is in Google Tango and the Phantom 4 drone

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

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anonymousDan
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_dev
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...](http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/were-missing-out-on-the-
bigger-picture-when-early-stage-tech-firms-sell-out-34158700.html)

~~~
anonymousDan
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.

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Olap84
Very strange to see it signed off with Sláinte. I never thought it used much
outside of Scotland

~~~
talideon
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).

~~~
Olap84
Thanks, good to learn the difference. Graves are a pain on UK keyboards
though, I propose they switch!

~~~
talideon
There 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.

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

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

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Hard 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.

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samfisher83
They use it in the phantom 4. That is a DJI drone.

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

~~~
dharma1
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

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trevyn
Anyone know how much Intel paid?

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

~~~
trevyn
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.

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matt42
Congratz guys!

~~~
zump
I'm jelly.

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Mmrnmhrm
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.

