Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick, a tiny fan-less deep-learning hardware that can be used to learn AI programming at the edge 

Johannesburg, South Africa, 4 August 2017 - RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc (LSE:ECM), the global distributor for engineers, introduces the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick (NCS), which is the newest development tool for ultra-low-power deep-learning inference. The tool enables developers to develop and prototype artificial intelligence (AI) applications to a broad range of devices at the edge in a convenient USB form factor. 

Targeting developers, corporate R&D and academic researchers working in machine-learning and data-science applications, the Neural Compute Stick integrates the Movidius™ Vision Processing Unit (VPU), which offers best-in-class power efficiency and is capable of running high-performance floating-point Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs).  Supporting the popular Caffe Deep Neural Network (DNN) framework, the Neural Compute Stick is ideal for use as a development tool for neural network prototyping and acceleration.

The USB-form-factor inference engine enables developers and researchers to free their projects from the Cloud and allow them to learn quickly about the performance and accuracy of their neural network applications running in the real world. Neural network projects can be quickly ported via the Movidius™ Neural Compute Compiler to run real-time deep-learning inference on the compact USB stick. Enabling the acceleration of existing compute-constrained platforms, the NCS enables deep-learning R&D and prototyping on a Linux laptop or any x86-based host device.

In addition, the Neural Compute Platform API allows user applications to run on an embedded host, which can initialise the target platform, load a graph file and offload inferences. Support for the NCS will also be extended in the future to include other platforms such as the Raspberry Pi. The complete list of software tools available in the Movidius™ Neural Compute Software Development Kit includes the Movidius™ Neural Compute toolkit and the Movidius™ Neural Compute API. These tools are available online on the developer.movidius.com website.  

The Intel Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick is now available from RS Components.

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About RS Components 

RS Components is the market leader in the high service level distribution of electrical, electronic, mechanical, tools and industrial products. Operating in 26 countries whilst serving a further 100 through third-party distributors, RS serves every sector of industry in the procurement of their products relating to maintenance, repair, operations, low volume production, research and development.   

With over 500 000 products across 2500 leading brands, the company is committed to ensuring that their 1,5 million customers have fast access to a broad, as well as deep range, of products and technologies, all under one roof. RS’s customers, whether ordering single or multiple items, experience a quick, easy, secure, painless and cost effective process. 

The RS catalogue, available at za.rs-online.com, offers full colour pictures with extensive clear product specifications.  Free access to thousands of datasheets ensures the correct product choice.  Order placement is easily facilitated through za.rs-online.com, the call centre, e-mail, fax and trade counter. 

Locally held stock is delivered to customers within 24 hours, and products held internationally, within four to six working days.    

It is proven that departments traditionally spend 80% of their time sourcing products that account for only 20% of their total procurement spend. RS is focussed on reducing the customers “total cost of product ownership” by reducing the need to make multiple calls to various companies to source products, reducing supplier related administration and allowing for the amalgamation as well as consolidation of supplier bases. 

Through this process, procurement efficiency is improved and time is freed up to concentrate on the more important business decisions. 

For more information, please visit the website at za.rs-online.com  

Press OfficeLe-andra OlivierPR and Communications SpecialistRS Components South AfricaLe-andra.Olivier@rs-components.com+27 11 691 9345 

Further information is available via these links:

• Twitter: @rsonline_SA; @DesignSparkRS
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• LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/company/rscoms 

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