Movidius has announced that the company has entered a partnership with Google in order to accelerate the adoption of deep learning within mobile devices. Both companies have collaborated with one another back in 2014 for its “Project Tango” devices.
As part of the agreement between both parties, Google will be sourcing the Myriad 2 MA2450 processor from Movidius. This processor is referred to as a “vision processing unit” and as created only for image recognition purposes. As such, the power draw of the chip is much, much lower than a standard smart device processor.
Google’s partnership with Movidius is part of the company’s plan to “accelerate the adoption of deep learning within mobile devices”. Deep learning refers to a complex neural network – a computer program that mimics the human brain. These neural networks have been utilised in image and speech recognition tools. Some applications that uses neural networks includes SwiftKey and Translate.
Not much is known about what Google intends to do with the processor, but as the announcement says that Google will be implementing said chips into personal devices, we speculate that it will have something to do with biometrics. Seeing as Google is also working on its own self-driving car, this partnership may not only be limited to smart devices.
