OXFORD, UK, 21 July 2017 – RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc (LSE:ECM), the global distributor for engineers, today announced the sale of the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick (NCS), (http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/processor-microcontroller-development-kits/1393655/) which is the newest development tool for ultra-low-power deep-learning inference. The tool enables developers to develop and prototype artificial intelligence (AI) applications to a broad range of devices at the edge in a convenient USB form factor.

Targeting developers, corporate R&D and academic researchers working in machine-learning and data-science applications, the Neural Compute Stick integrates the Movidius™ Vision Processing Unit (VPU), which offers best-in-class power efficiency and is capable of running high-performance floating-point Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs).

Supporting the popular Caffe Deep Neural Network (DNN) framework, the Neural Compute Stick is ideal for use as a development tool for neural network prototyping and acceleration. The USB-form-factor inference engine enables developers and researchers to free their projects from the Cloud and allow them to learn quickly about the performance and accuracy of their neural network applications running in the real world. Neural network projects can be quickly ported via the Movidius™ Neural Compute Compiler to run real-time deep-learning inference on the compact USB stick.

Enabling the acceleration of existing compute-constrained platforms, the NCS enables deep-learning R&D and prototyping on a Linux laptop or any x86-based host device. In addition, the Neural Compute Platform API allows user applications to run on an embedded host, which can initialise the target platform, load a graph file and offload inferences. Support for the NCS will also be extended in the future to include other platforms such as the Raspberry Pi.

The complete list of software tools available in the Movidius™ Neural Compute Software Development Kit includes the Movidius™ Neural Compute toolkit and the Movidius™ Neural Compute API. These tools are available online on the developer.movidius.com website. (https://developer.movidius.com/)

The Intel Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick is available now from RS in the EMEA and Asia Pacific regions.

About RS Components
RS Components and Allied Electronics are the trading brands of Electrocomponents plc, the global distributor for engineers. With operations in 32 countries, we offer more than 500,000 products through the internet, catalogues and at trade counters to over one million customers, shipping around 50,000 parcels a day. Our products, sourced from 2,500 leading suppliers, include electronic components, electrical, automation and control, and test and measurement equipment, and engineering tools and consumables.

Electrocomponents is listed on the London Stock Exchange and in the last financial year ended 31 March 2017 had revenues of £1.51bn.

For more information, please visit the website at http://www.rs-online.com.