Movidius, an Intel company, is introducing the Neural Compute Stick, the first USB-based deep learning inference kit and self-contained AI accelerator that delivers dedicated deep neural network processing capabilities to host devices.

Designed for product developers, researchers and makers, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick (NCS) aims to reduce barriers to developing, tuning and deploying AI applications by delivering dedicated high-performance deep-neural network processing in a small form factor.

The Movidius NCS is powered by their Myriad 2 vision processing unit (VPU), and, according to Intel, can reach over 100 GFLOPs of performance within an nominal 1W of power consumption. Under the hood, the Movidius NCS works by translating a standard, trained Caffe-based convolutional neural network (CNN) into an embedded neural network that then runs on the VPU. In production workloads, the NCS can be used as a discrete accelerator for speeding up or offloading neural network tasks. Otherwise for development workloads, the company offers several developer-centric features, including layer-by-layer neural networks metrics to allow developers to analyze and optimize performance and power, and validation scripts to allow developers to compare the output of the NCS against the original PC model in order to ensure the accuracy of the NCS's model.

Movidius Neural Compute Stick is now available for purchase through for MSRP $79.