Google’s Clips camera may be a little creepy, but it also seems pretty useful for the right user; deploying machine learning to automatically snap the best pictures of your kids and pets. But the key to that functionality isn’t just Google’s AI prowess, it also requires a specialized processor built by the Intel-owned chipmaker Movidius.

The chip in question is the Myriad 2, which Movidius describes as a “visual processing unit” or VPU. (That’s as opposed to a graphics processing unit, GPU; or central processing unit, CPU.) The Myriad 2 is a processor tailor-made to handle machine vision tasks like object recognition, and Movidius claims it’s the “industry’s first always-on vision processor.” It’s previously shown up in Google’s Project…

Continue reading…