Intel has announced the purchase of Movidius, an Ireland-based manufacturer of low-power system on a chip (SoC) components. Intel says that it will integrate Movidius SoCs with its RealSense computer vision platform in order to play a larger role in the markets for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).
“Simply put, computer vision enables machines to visually process and understand their surroundings. Cameras serve as the ‘eyes’ of the device, the central processing unit is the ‘brain’ and a vision processor is the ‘visual cortex,'” blogged Josh Walden, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s New Technology Group. “As devices become smarter and more distributed, we recognize that specific system-on-a-chip (SoC) attributes will be paramount to giving human-like sight to the 50 billion connected devices that are projected by 2020. … With Movidius, Intel gains low-power, high-performance SoC platforms for accelerating computer vision applications.”
