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NEW YORK: In its bid to play a leading role in giving human-like sight to the 50 billion connected devices that are projected by 2020, Intel has acquired San Mateo-headquartered computer vision hardware-maker Movidius.
"I'm excited to announce our pending acquisition of Movidius. With Movidius, Intel gains low-power, high-performance SoC (System on a Chip) platforms for accelerating computer vision applications," Josh Walden, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's New Technology Group said in a statement.
Movidius is working with customers like Google and Lenovo to give sight to smart devices including drones, security cameras, AR/VR headsets and more.
"Our leading VPU (Vision Processing Unit) platform for on-device vision processing combined with Intel's industry leading depth sensing solution (Intel RealSense Technology) is a winning combination for autonomous machines that can see in 3D," Movidius CEO Remi El-Ouazzane said in a separate statement.
Computer vision enables machines to visually process and understand their surroundings.
I've been involved in mergers and acquisitions for decades, and I used to run an acquisition cleanup team while at IBM. I've seen so many bad acquisitions that it is generally far easier to point out the good ones. What is somewhat ironic, given my background, is that the best largely have been executed by Dell, using a process initially developed by IBM.
One of the most painful mergers I was involved with was the one between HP and Compaq -- which I aggressively tried to kill, fearing neither firm would survive it intact. It was completed, but the cost in jobs at all levels was extreme for both companies, and both CEOs eventually were forced out. Meg Whitman, currently CEO of HPE, reversed it for the most part.
In contrast, the Dell + EMC merger, which will complete this week, has been a lesson in excellence, with goals, planning and execution that stand as an example of how to do these things, as well as two surrounding thought-to-be-impossible accomplishments. I think we are seeing history being made.
I'll share some thoughts on doing the impossible this week and close with my product of the week: the NVIDIA Titan X, an amazingly powerful graphics card to lust after.
Nvidia and Baidu have agreed to collaborate on the incorporation of artificial intelligence in a cloud-to-car autonomous vehicle platform, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said Wednesday at the Baidu World Conference in Beijing.
The companies plan to integrate Baidu's cloud platform and mapping technology with Nvidia's self-driving computing platform. They will work together to create solutions for high-definition maps, Level 3 autonomous vehicle control and automated parking.
"We're going to bring together the technical capabilities and the expertise in AI and the scale of two world-class AI companies to build the self-driving car architecture from end-to-end, from top-to-bottom, from the cloud to the car," Jen-Hsun said.
"We can start applying these capabilities to solve the grand challenges of AI, one of which is intelligent machines," he added. "One of the intelligent machines we would like to build in the future is the self-driving car."
The companies demonstrated the Drive PX 2 system -- the world's first in-car artificial intelligence supercomputer development platform -- and DriveWorks software. Nvidia and Baidu will codevelop autonomous vehicle technology for Chinese-based as well as global car makers.
Baidu likely could utilize the technology for its own taxi fleet as well, as it recently invested in Didi Chuxing, which last month announced a deal to take over the Chinese operations of Uber.
Snapchat and Instagram, look out. Apple has you in its sights. The company is working on a video-sharing app with features similar to those found in Snapchat and Instagram, Bloomberg reported last week.
The app, possibly slated for release in 2017, will allow users of Apple devices to record a video, apply filters and draw on it, then share it with others on a variety of social networks.
Ease of use and quickness are paramount in the software's design. Users can perform most of its functions with one hand -- shooting, editing and uploading videos in less than a minute, noted Bloomberg. One version of the app allows users to shoot square video footage, as Instagram does.
Although current plans reportedly call for a standalone app, Apple may decide to bundle the functions with a future version of its camera app.
Apple has hired Joe Weil, who codeveloped the KnowMe video-blogging app, to lead the team on the project, which is being forged in the same department that created Apple's iMovie and Final Cut Pro video-editing apps, according to the Bloomberg report.
AMD, which has been clawing its way out of the doldrums, recently showcased its octacore, 16-thread Summit Ridge desktop processor featuring its Zen core in a performance match-up against Intel's octacore Broadwell-E Core i7-6900K CPU.
The two similarly configured processors were locked at 3 GHz for the test, in which they ran the multithreaded Blender rendering application, in a demo presented earlier this month in San Francisco.
"They showed a benchmark where, under the conditions they set, they came up neck and neck with Broadwell, which is Intel's highest-performing chip," acknowledged Martin Reynolds, a Gartner distinguished analyst.
However, "that doesn't guarantee you great performance," he told TechNewsWorld.