RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc (LSE: ECM), a global multi-channel distributor, today announced it is shipping the recently launched Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2 (Intel® NCS 2) – a highly affordable small and fanless computer-vision and deep-neural-network (DNN) accelerator.

As well as for use by data scientists and academics, the device is ideal for a wide selection of developers and engineers looking at integrating computer-vision and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into their Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Available in the convenient USB form factor, the stick delivers high versatility for users, enabling deep-learning prototyping on a laptop or device with a USB interface.

Like its predecessor product – the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick, which was launched in 2017 – the Intel NCS 2 is based on the Intel® Movidius™ Vision Processing Unit (VPU). However, it deploys the latest version: the Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ X VPU, which has a dedicated hardware accelerator for DNN inference.

The Intel NCS 2 also becomes a highly versatile prototyping and development tool when combined with the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit, which offers support for deep learning, computer vision and hardware acceleration to enable applications that have human-like vision capabilities. The combination of the Intel NCS 2 and the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit enables a fast development-to-deployment cycle: from prototyping trained DNNs on the compute stick to the easy porting of DNNs to an Intel Movidius VPU-based embedded device or system with minimal code changes required, if any. The Intel NCS 2 also provides support for the popular open-source Caffe and TensorFlow DNN software libraries.

The Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 is shipping now from RS in the EMEA and Asia Pacific regions.