[HN Gopher] Intel issues end-of-life notice for RealSense Lidar
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Intel issues end-of-life notice for RealSense Lidar
Author : thesausageking
Score : 83 points
Date : 2021-09-13 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.therobotreport.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.therobotreport.com)
| spockz wrote:
| So what is this? In this thread and previous threads I read many
| comments about people being hit by intel dropping the shoe on
| products that are actually great. Why don't they capitalise on
| these great products and actually diversify?
| randomluck040 wrote:
| In our area I think where I work we're the only ones that have
| a bunch of those sensors. It's niche, HN in general is niche so
| I think they're not selling millions of their LIDAR sensors.
| Still for those that rely on them it's sad.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Because of course every one of (the very few) users is going to
| complain on HN about a product they use being EOL'ed.
|
| An to put it in perspective, Intel's IOT group, which is (lol)
| mostly Point of Sale and MRI machines, does $3bn of revenue a
| year.
|
| Intel is a big ship, and outside of new platforms (like
| smartphones were), there are few meaningful ways to diversify.
|
| Hell, even if they bought NXP (one of the actual leaders in
| IOT), that would still only constitute 10% of their revenue.
| michaelt wrote:
| Because the 'great products' aren't selling in large enough
| volumes to cover the division's wage bill.
|
| And presumably they don't think selling far fewer at a much
| higher price would do so either.
| Causality1 wrote:
| What's the point of winding down departments like this? Spin them
| off into their own company to sink or swim.
| dagmx wrote:
| Not surprised. I had one of their devices, and it was just a
| mess.
|
| The resolution and reliability was not as good as comparable
| devices in the price range like Microsoft's Azure Kinect DK.
|
| Their software didn't work as well as what Microsoft cooked up,
| and it always felt like they put out this product and then just
| forgot about it.
| michaelt wrote:
| Eh, it doesn't matter how low the price is for the Azure Kinect
| if you can't buy them at the price.
|
| And you're still stuck with USB C on Kinect, so it's not like
| it lets you escape the consumer-grade reliability.
|
| If there are other devices with the same performance as the
| realsense lidar at a lower price, we'd all love to hear about
| them!
| dheera wrote:
| "Consumer-grade" reliability really should be the _highest-
| grade_ reliability. Cables get cantilevered by standing
| desks, rolled over by office chairs, bitten by dogs, chewed
| by babies, shoved in pockets and skiied with, and sat on.
|
| The people who designed USB-C were probably lazy people
| sitting in office chairs all day and never got out enough to
| see what real consumers do.
|
| I break about a USB-C cable a week. Never happened with
| headphone jacks, barrel connectors, IEC power connectors, and
| the like -- those are real consumer grade stuff, especially
| IEC.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Get a good quality cable. I break USB-C cables maybe once
| every year and a half, less often than I broke headphones
| or microUSB.
| dheera wrote:
| I break Anker PowerLine+ cables all the time, not sure
| what's better.
|
| The connector design itself is shit, and the rubberized
| housing of the connector isn't mechanically supported as
| any self-respecting consumer-grade cable should be, all
| torque transfers to the PCB and that's horrible design.
| klodolph wrote:
| Definitely shouldn't be anywhere near highest reliability.
| Professional equipment has to stand up to a lot more use--
| like a camera you use every day, made with more metal and
| with thick rubberized grips. If I have a personal camera,
| I'll take care not to drop it. If I'm a professional
| photographer, the question is how often it gets dropped. If
| we're talking cables, "professional" grade (to me) means
| the connectors are going to get hundreds of cycles per
| year, and the cables might have to snake across the floor
| and get tread on five days a week. In general, "pro" grade
| stuff can be bigger, bulkier, more expensive.
|
| Then there's stuff built for public spaces. ATMs, books in
| the public library, turnstyles at the metro, etc. All
| designed to be in close contact with people who either just
| don't care or are actively trying to damage it.
|
| TBH I don't know what the grade _below_ consumer-grade
| would be.
| derefr wrote:
| I would say that the grade below consumer grade is
| "functional prop" grade.
|
| There's a type of consumer electronics available on
| Wish/AliExpress/etc., which is designed for people who
| want to _appear at a glance to be using_ a certain
| expensive device, for status-signalling reasons. The
| devices only have to be real enough to allow you to
| pretend to be using them without drawing suspicion, and
| only have to be rugged enough to last until the device
| being mimicked isn't fashionable to have any more (at
| which point you get a new knock-off aping the new cool
| thing.)
|
| Surprisingly, these devices do _work!_ They wouldn 't be
| convincing otherwise. (How can you seem to be using the
| best new phone if you have to pull out a different phone
| to check your text messages? How can you seem to be
| playing a Switch or a PS4 if it doesn't turn on and show
| pictures and sound on the screen/a TV?) It's just that
| they work as terribly as you can imagine, given that
| costs are optimized to meet the minimum needs of someone
| playing pretend and no more.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Mil-spec?
| dheera wrote:
| Military people just sit in canopies and hit buttons
| these days.
|
| Consumers are the ones that will actually have cables
| _bitten_ , _chewed_ , _stomped_ , sat on by unfit, heavy
| civilian asses, jammed into wheels of office chairs,
| rammed into by strangers' hips in coffee shops when your
| connector hangs off the edge, dunked in cereal,
| splattered by kitchen grease, smashed into rocks at
| Yosemite, and shoved into bags while plugged in after a
| slow TSA checkpoint and needing to sprint as fast as
| possible to a departure gate.
|
| Very different set of ruggedness requirements. Most
| cables of the 80s and 90s were completely fine in these
| civilian environments.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| Jerk grade reliability, this stuff will explode if
| stepped on
| [deleted]
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Honestly, I have no idea what Intel was doing playing with
| sensors and robots. I think the previous CEO was trying to
| diversify, seeing his failures in the CPU business, and rather
| than playing to company's strengths he looked at whatever hot
| tech was out there.
| Traster wrote:
| Yeah the previous CEO bascially announced a number of big bets
| - AI, 5G, VR, Autonomous Driving and one or two others (can't
| remember off the top of my head), they were all associated with
| a number of big acquisitions most of which ended pretty
| embarassingly (Altera for 5G, MobilEye for Autonomous driving,
| Nervana for AI etc)
|
| It followed the same familiar pattern, screw up the company
| over a long protracted acquisition, try to gain market share
| through bundling, all whilst driving the core talent ouf of the
| business by completely failing to invest. This is a big reason
| where Intel's problems came from. They looked to diversify
| rather than deliver.
| jsight wrote:
| How is mobileye embarrassing? They seem to be overwhelmingly
| the most common choice among automotive OEMs, and their
| growth rate is really solid already.
| zamadatix wrote:
| RealSense camera technology was used in laptops for Windows
| Hello the same way as Intel NICs and Intel GPUs and Intel audio
| controllers and Intel SSDs were used by their traditional
| segment.
|
| It'd be a bit silly for Intel to be successful in all of those
| spaces and not ask "and what would it look like to sell this
| part without bundling our CPU".
| worrycue wrote:
| This isn't the first time Intel has flirted with things outside
| their core competence. They dabbled with SSDs, mobile phone
| modems, ... etc. It's just something Intel does. Why? Don't
| know.
| bluGill wrote:
| All companies need to flirt with things that might be good.
| Some of those things will turn out so great that you leave
| your orignial company behind, while others will be duds that
| you drop, and still others will be small side businesses that
| make you a bit of money in down times but otherwise are just
| barely worth doing. Intel used to be a memory company that
| flirted with making CPUs. I don't recall when they left the
| memory business (I think in the 1980s)
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Intel used to be a RAM company that sold microprocessors as
| a side business.
| thrashh wrote:
| I mean we've had Bell Labs et. al. and now we have
| transistors, Unix, CCDs to allow digital cameras, etc...
|
| They can keep on trucking with R&D
| yann2 wrote:
| They are big enough to take the loss. No harm in trying.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Unless you actually get duped into using XScale, Zephyr,
| Edison, etc....
| snovv_crash wrote:
| I get SSDs and modems, this allows them to leverage their
| fabs. Maybe even CCDs. But 3D computational geometry, camera
| lenses and LIDAR? And drones? This seems a bit out-of-line to
| me.
| morcheeba wrote:
| The sad thing is that Intel had a real advantage in
| RealSense... they had good processors in there (especially
| with the Movidius chips) that were well integrated (e.g. they
| didn't have to support a fancy SDK for all users - just the
| internal Realsense group). Doing the same 3d processing with
| ARM or Intel is 1/10th the frame rate at much more power.
| reasonabl_human wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the benefits of what intel built here
| as opposed to doing the processing on host machines? My
| company uses these in some products but I never
| investigated the market or trade space for this type of
| device
| morcheeba wrote:
| Yeah! There is a lot of processing to do the disparity
| calculation... it's basically doing lots of correlations
| with a different amount of x shift and finding the
| delta-x that has the highest correlation. This delta-x
| disparity gets calculated in to a z distance.
|
| So, intel made a custom processor for this that's really
| good at the correlations. The original one was the D4,
| and later they used their movidius chip. Both have lots
| of multiplier-accumulate silicon, so it can do the
| computations in parallel. Their architectures are also
| set up for convolution (which re-uses a lot of data)
| rather than random-processing (like a CPU does), so they
| could feed these math engines without a lot of data
| transfer -- this makes it more power efficient. You could
| do something similar in an FPGA, but dedicated silicon is
| going to be faster, cheaper, and use less power.
| sseagull wrote:
| Tech companies don't know what to do with all their money
| (although Intel perhaps a bit less so).
|
| Google's core is search & advertising. But they are also in
| email, video streaming, messaging & video chat, cloud
| computing, mobile phones, gaming (Stadia), self-driving cars,
| drone delivery, quantum computing, and probably many other
| things that I can't think of.
|
| Edit: Yes I know it's technically Alphabet, but in practical
| terms, it's Google
| rualca wrote:
| > Tech companies don't know what to do with all their money
| (although Intel perhaps a bit less so).
|
| Lidar has high computational needs, which directly
| influences accuracy, and both spacial and time resolution.
|
| Post-processing steps also have high computational needs,
| such as infering structure, do coregistration, handle point
| density, etc.
|
| Also, practical applications often demand and depend on
| meeting constraints such as low power requirements and
| size.
|
| If a company such as Intel managed to leverage their know-
| how to provide Lidar hardware that was competitive in both
| performance and price then they could as well develop a
| machine that prints money.
| kypro wrote:
| I tested one of their preproduction LIDAR cameras just before it
| was released and it was great. Their SR305 was also really good
| for close-range, high precision applications, but they scraped
| that model earlier this year.
|
| For us it was the SR305 we were interested in as it had the specs
| we needed at the right price point. We had a meeting with the
| RealSense team about a year and a half ago and they strongly
| hinted at the SR305 being EOL soon which made it very hard for us
| to commit to RealSense for the project we were working on.
|
| I'm quite surprised about this news though. Back then they
| suggested that LIDAR and stereo cameras would be their focus
| going forward. I can only assume this must be a recent move given
| what we were told back then and that the L515 is relatively new.
|
| Huge shame about their facial auth products too. My understanding
| is that these are used in quite a few products, but they also use
| structed light tech so I assume that's why that decision was
| made.
|
| It's worth noting that the L515 isn't replaceable by the D455 in
| many use cases. The D455 is good, but doesn't have the same kind
| of range and precision the L515 has. It's depth data is also far
| nosier, as is often the case with stereo depth cameras.
| rcv wrote:
| This is a real shame - I just finished lobbying to use these at
| work after some very successful initial prototypes.
|
| Does anyone have any experience with the TI mmWave sensors[1] for
| AMR collision avoidance?
|
| [1] https://www.ti.com/sensors/mmwave-radar/overview.html
| drno123 wrote:
| My company built several successfull products using TI's mmWave
| sensors. If you'd like more info, send me your contact to
| mmwave@mailinator.com, I will be checking that mailbox today
| and tomorrow.
| madars wrote:
| You probably don't want to use mailinator.com address for
| this: anyone can read messages sent to it.
| scrowe1 wrote:
| Wonder when the same will ultimately happen to the stereo depth
| cameras. what are some good alternatives here?
| corndoge wrote:
| I heard the whole division is shutting down so probably won't
| be long now.
| zwieback wrote:
| I thought that already happened? I think they are just selling
| what they have now but stopped development. Keyence, Flir and a
| few other established machine vision companies have stereo
| systems but nothing like RealSense, which was trying to make
| stereo more of a mainstream application.
| rcv wrote:
| They aren't officially EOLing the stereo cameras yet, but
| their assurances about how long they'll remain in production
| have been very hand-wavey.
|
| Does FLIR actually have a stereo solution? Back when they
| were Point Grey they sold the Bumblebee, but all of the
| stereo processing was done on the host machine.
| zwieback wrote:
| Yeah, I guess that's obsolete too. My experience with
| stereo is that there's so much work in calibration and
| ensuring you get reliable correlation results between
| regions from the two cameras that plug-and-play solutions
| are very hard.
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