tech giant Intel is making two huge moves this week. The US-based company has just unveiled to the tech world its latest creation, the new OpenVINO toolkit. It also confirmed its answer to AMD’s latest challenges, the new Cannon Lake processor.
According to reports, the newly introduced OpenVINO, which stands for Open Visual Interference & Neural network Optimization, is a toolkit for the quick deployment of deep learning and computer vision for edge computing in cameras and IoT(Internet of Things)-enabled devices. The toolkit will help developers will allow developers to build and deploy AI models in the cloud computing environment as well as popular open sources frameworks such as TensorFlow and MXNet.
The news about OpenVINO comes after the software giant Microsoft announced plans to build its own computer vision developer kit for edge computing. Microsoft’s planned computer vision toolkit will utilize Microsoft Azure Machine Learning services, Qualcomm’s AI Engine and Qualcomm’s Vision Intelligence Platform.
About the new OpenVINO toolkit
As posted on the company’s blog post, the OpenVINO provides a set of optimization capabilities and a runtime engine that allows developers to run their model on the architecture that best suits their needs, whether it's a highly-tuned FPGA, an efficient VPU, or another choice. This new toolkit will take advantage of Intel’s huge investment in various AI (artificial intelligence) accelerator technologies, which include field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), Movidius vision processing units and CPUs.
As for its potential applications, OpenVINO will be applicable across a broad range of markets, which include the retail, energy, industrial, and medical. This new technology is now being used in big tech companies like Amazon Web Services, Honeywell, Dell, and GE Healthcare for its medical imaging business. In terms of competition, the technology currently competes with a number of computer vision services from tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
In addition to the newly introduced OpenVINO, the company also developed Computer Vision SDK and acquired Mobileye, a computer vision company that focuses on autonomous technology. Intel will be hosting an AI conference for developers later this month, so expect some big news coming from the tech giant in the next few days.
New Cannon Lake processor confirmed
In other Intel-related stories, the tech giant has confirmed works on a 10 nm Cannon Lake mobile processor, which the German website Computer Base said might find its way into some of Lenovo laptops. The new Cannon Lake processor will have two cores, four threads and has a base clock speed of up to 2.2GHz with a turbo boost of 3.2 GHz. It will be built on a 10nm manufacturing process and will support two new kinds of memory, the LPDDR4, and LPDDR4X.
Intel already confirmed news about the Cannon Lake processor its own website. But Intel has not mentioned anything about the official release date. It remains tight-lipped about this matter.