Rockchip Teases the Next Generation Flagship Processor RK3688 for On-Device Artificial Intelligence

Rockchip is preparing to launch a new system-on-chip targeting the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) and machine learning (ML) at the edge: the Rockchip RK3688, which includes both a powerful graphics processor and a dedicated 16 tera-operations per second (TOPS) neural coprocessor.

"Next generation flagship processor RK3688," Rockchip writes, in translation, in a presentation slide teasing some technical details of the upcoming part, "for AIoT applications. Advanced processors: CPU ~250k DMIPS [Dhrystone Millions of Instructions Per Second], GPU >1 TGFLOPS [sic, likely Tera-Floating Point Operations Per Second], NPU ~16 TOPS."

The new part, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is designed to sit at the very top of Rockchip's line-up — though the company hasn't released full specifications, only highlights. The CPU cores, for example, are said to be based on Arm's ARMv9.3 architecture and be part of the Cortex-A7xx series — but at the time of writing Arm had only announced ARMv9.2 parts in that family. The number of cores, too, is not specified, and neither is their clock speed.

What Rockchip has confirmed is that the CPU cores, however many there may be, will be joined by an unspecified graphics processor delivering more than one "TGFLOPS" of compute — a typo, most likely, for one tera-floating point operations per second (TFLOPS). A multi-core neural processing unit, again unspecified, will complete the trio of architectures, offering 16 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of INT8 precision compute for on-device artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads.

Interestingly, the slide suggests this same NPU, alongside a multi-core CPU supporting 256-bit vector operations, will be made available as a "large computing power coprocessor" with on-chip DRAM and the ability to create multi-chip accelerators to "multiply computing power expansion." As with the main system-on-chip announcement, though, details have not been disclosed.

The same slide also promises a mid-range part, an entry in the Rockchip RK35xx family — and for this the company has offered more details: two Arm Cortex-A72 cores running at 2GHz, six Cortex-A53 cores running at 1.8GHz, an Arm Mali-G310 graphics processor running at 800MHz, and a two-TOPS NPU.

Rockchip has yet to publish any information about the upcoming products on its site, but embedded computing specialist Radxa has already issued a statement pledging to use the RK3688 for a next-generation ROCK 6 single-board computer.