AI News: Movidius Announces Miriad X, Cambricon Raises $100M in Series A Round

TomsHardware: Intel Movidius releases Miriad X Vision Processing Unit (VPU) with a dedicated Neural Compute Engine. The SoC includes vision accelerators, a Neural Compute Engine, imaging accelerators, and 16 SHAVE vector processors with a total of up to 4 TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second) of performance in 1.5W power package:

Medium, China Money Network: China-based Cambricon AI startup raises $100M at reported $1b valuation. Cambricon was founded by Prof. Chen Tianshi in 2016 as a spin-off from the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Science. Its processor, the Cambricon-1A, is claimed to be the first commercial chip for deep learning applications and can be used in robotics, drones, autonomous vehicles and consumer electronics. It is said to have a better performance when running mainstream AI algorithms, is more energy efficient and has a higher integration density.

The total revenue of the AI-related deep learning chip market is forecast to rise from $500M in 2016 to $12.2b in 2025 at CAGR of over 40%, according to Tractica market research.

Update: Digitimes reports that Cambricon expects to roll out hundreds of millions of AI SoCs for smart terminal devices and servers in the next three years, the CEO Chen Tianshi said. Cambricon will license its processor instruction set to more enterprises engaged in AI applications. In this regard, Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset, to be released in September, is to carry the IP instruction set for Cambricon-1A co-processor.