According to foreign technology media Phoronix reported that Intel quietly canceled the Thunder Bay SoC, which integrated a general-purpose CPU core and Movidius hardware for computer vision.
Intel has not yet disclosed the specific reasons for the cancellation of the SoC. At present, Intel still hopes to separate the CPU and visual processing unit (VPU).
The Thunder Bay SoC is a low-power design that includes Arm Cortex-A53 CPU cores and Movidius VPU hardware, although the exact configuration is not yet known. This SoC is primarily intended for business and IoT applications that require computer vision acceleration and general-purpose processing power.
The Linux Kernel will start supporting Thunder Bay in the mainline code in 2021; related functions will continue upstream in 2022.
Intel released a set of patches yesterday to begin removing Thunder Bay code from the Linux kernel. This removal started with the eMMC patch and then expanded to other content.
The patch is as follows: “Delete Thunder Bay related code, as this product has been canceled and has no end customers or users”.
