Rockchip is making ready to launch a brand new system-on-chip concentrating on the Synthetic Intelligence of Issues (AIoT) and machine studying (ML) on the edge: the Rockchip RK3688, which incorporates each a robust graphics processor and a devoted 16 tera-operations per second (TOPS) neural coprocessor.
“Subsequent era flagship processor RK3688,” Rockchip writes, in translation, in a presentation slide teasing some technical particulars of the upcoming half, “for AIoT purposes. Superior processors: CPU ~250k DMIPS [Dhrystone Millions of Instructions Per Second], GPU >1 TGFLOPS [sic, likely Tera-Floating Point Operations Per Second], NPU ~16 TOPS.”
Rockchip has teased its upcoming AIoT system-on-chip, the RK3688, in a detail-light slide (translated above.) (📷: Gongxin Zhixun/Rockchip)
The brand new half, dropped at our consideration by CNX Software program, is designed to sit down on the very prime of Rockchip’s line-up — although the corporate hasn’t launched full specs, solely highlights. The CPU cores, for instance, are mentioned to be primarily based on Arm’s ARMv9.3 structure and be a part of the Cortex-A7xx sequence — however on the time of writing Arm had solely introduced ARMv9.2 elements in that household. The variety of cores, too, is just not specified, and neither is their clock velocity.
What Rockchip has confirmed is that the CPU cores, nonetheless many there could also be, can be joined by an unspecified graphics processor delivering a couple of “TGFLOPS” of compute — a typo, most probably, for one tera-floating level operations per second (TFLOPS). A multi-core neural processing unit, once more unspecified, will full the trio of architectures, providing 16 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of INT8 precision compute for on-device synthetic intelligence and machine studying workloads.
Curiously, the slide suggests this similar NPU, alongside a multi-core CPU supporting 256-bit vector operations, can be made out there as a “giant computing energy coprocessor” with on-chip DRAM and the power to create multi-chip accelerators to “multiply computing energy growth.” As with the primary system-on-chip announcement, although, particulars haven’t been disclosed.
Radxa has already pledged to make use of the RK3688 within the successor to its ROCK 5 household of single-board computer systems (pictured). (📷: Radxa)
The identical slide additionally guarantees a mid-range half, an entry within the Rockchip RK35xx household — and for this the corporate has provided extra particulars: two Arm Cortex-A72 cores working at 2GHz, six Cortex-A53 cores working at 1.8GHz, an Arm Mali-G310 graphics processor working at 800MHz, and a two-TOPS NPU.
Rockchip has but to publish any details about the upcoming merchandise on its website, however embedded computing specialist Radxa has already issued a press release pledging to make use of the RK3688 for a next-generation ROCK 6 single-board laptop.