FAQs about the Discontinuation of the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick
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Why has Intel decided to discontinue the Intel® Movidius Neural Compute Stick (NCS)?
The new, improved Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2 (Intel® NCS 2) features Intel’s latest high-performance vision processing unit: The Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ X VPU. It features more compute cores and a dedicated hardware accelerator for deep neural network inference. With this, the Intel® NCS 2 delivers up to eight times the performance boost when compared with the previous-generation Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick (NCS).Will Intel continue to support the Intel® Movidius Neural Compute Stick (NCS)? Where can I find technical support?
Intel will continue to provide technical support through the Intel forums until April 30, 2021. For technical support, visit the Computer Vision Forum.Where can I request a warranty replacement? What is the warranty period for the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick?
The Intel® Movidius Neural Compute Stick has a One-Year limited warranty. There may be additional statutory rights that vary from country to country. Intel will continue to provide warranty support until April 30, 2022. To request a warranty replacement, visit our Warranty Information site.I'm currently developing on the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick (NCS) with the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute SDK (Intel® Movidius™ NCSDK). What options do I have to continue developing with Intel products?
Intel is offering a new and improved product, Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2. This product uses the latest Intel® Movidius™ Myriad X VPU along with the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Toolkit. Additionally, the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Toolkit will support your existing Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick.While the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute SDK will continue to be available, Intel encourages users to transition to the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Toolkit. There are no further software updates planned for the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute SDK.
What are some benefits of using the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Toolkit? How do I to transition from the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute SDK to the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Toolkit?
The OpenVINO™ toolkit is provided for users of the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick (NCS). It includes software tools, an API, and examples. All of these are designed to enable developers to create software that takes advantage of the accelerated neural network capability provided by the NCS hardware.The OpenVINO™ toolkit supports both the original NCS and the Intel® NCS 2. It also supports Central Processing Unit (CPU), Graphics processing unit (GPU), and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware.
One advantage of the OpenVINO™ toolkit is that the deep learning framework support is expanded. This means you can compile a wider variety of trained networks for use with NCS devices. With NCSDK only Caffe* and TensorFlow* were supported, but the OpenVINO™ toolkit also provides support for the other deep learning frameworks. A variety of trained networks are available for all the frameworks.