Renesas Announces the RZ/V2N, a 15-Pruned-TOPS Energy-Efficient Chip for Edge AI and Computer Vision

Renesas is once again expanding its RZ/V series of microprocessors, this time with the RZ/V2N — targeting edge artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI and ML) workloads with an on-board Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor (DRP) delivering a claimed 15 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of "pruned" INT8 compute performance.

"Since launching the RZ/V2H last year to target next-generation robotics requiring vision AI and real-time control, we have received tremendous interest in using the Renesas DRP-AI accelerator," claims Renesas' Daryl Khoo, vice-president for embedded processing. "With the addition of the RZ/V2N, sharing the same lineage as the RZ/V2H, we are extending our reach to address mid-range applications, particularly endpoint vision AI that does not need to be realized with power hungry designs. I am excited that our customers will be able to select the best AI MPU [Microprocessor Unit] from Renesas that meets their system and budget requirements."

As Khoo says, the RZ/V2N is based on the company's existing RZ/V2H edge AI chip — and includes the same "Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor" accelerator technology, but scaled down. Where the DRP-AI3 coprocessor in the RZ/V2H delivers a claimed 80 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of INT8 compute, the one in the RZ/V2N manages 15 TOPS at a claimed 10 TOPS/W power efficiency. The catch, in all cases: Renesas' measurements are based on "pruned" performance, meaning running a simplified inferencing process designed to boost performance and reduce memory usage without adversely impacting accuracy too much. For "dense" inference, the measured performance drops to 4 TOPS.

As well as the DRP-AI3 coprocessor, the RZ/V2N includes four Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.8GHz and a Cortex-M33 "sub-CPU" running at up to 200MHz, though lacks the two Cortex-R8 cores of its larger sibling, an optional 4k image signal processor, hardware codecs for H.264 and H.265, an optional Arm Mali-G31 graphics processor, and a four-lane two-channel MIPI Camera Serial Interface 2 (CSI-2). It comes in around 38 per cent smaller than the RZ/V2H, the company says, and runs without the need for active cooling.

Renesas is showing off the RZ/V2N at Embedded World this week, Hall 1 Stand 234, and says the chip will be available direct and in the channel from March 19th; pricing had not been confirmed at the time of writing. More information is available on the official product page.