D-Robotics Launches the 10 TOPS Edge AI RDK X5 — and Teases the 96 TOPS RDK Ultra

Chinese embedded computing specialist D-Robotics has launched a new model in its RDK family of Raspberry Pi-inspired single-board computers, the eight-core D-Robotics RDK X5 — now coming complete with a neural coprocessor delivering a claimed 10 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute, with its planned successor the RDK Ultra promising up to 96 TOPS.

"RDK X5 is an all-in-one development kit with 10 TOPS computing capabilities for robotics and edge intelligence development," the company says of its latest board, which builds on the earlier X3. "With versatile interfaces and support for advanced models like transformer, RWKV [parallelizable recurrent neural network], and stereo perception, it simplifies and accelerates the deployment of cutting-edge AI [Artificial Intelligence] applications."

The board, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is built around the same form factor as the popular Raspberry Pi range of single-board computers — complete with the familiar 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header. Rather than a Broadcom chip, though, the RDK X5 is powered by a Sunrise X5 system-on-chip with eight Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.5GHz, a graphics processor with a claimed 32 giga-floating point operations per second (GFLOPS) of compute, and a "BPU" neural coprocessor delivering up to 10 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute for on-board machine learning and artificial intelligence — but sharing the 4GB or 8GB of on-board LPDDR4 memory with the host processor.

There's a single full-size HDMI video output supporting 1080p60, four USB 3.0 Type-A ports plus a USB 2.0 Type-C port and, oddly, a micro-USB port for a debug UART, a four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) connector, two four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connectors, analog audio in and out, gigabit Ethernet with optional Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) support, on-board Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4, that 40-pin GPIO header with 28 user-accessible IO pins, and a separate JST connector for a CAN bus — suggesting, if the company's name wasn't clue enough, a desire to see the board find a home in robotics projects.

At the same time as launching the RDK X5, D-Robotics has also teased a more powerful system-on-module (SOM) design dubbed the RDK Ultra. Using a SODIMM form-factor designed to offer competition to NVIDIA's Jetson family of systems-on-modules and be pin-compatible with the Jetson Orin range, the RDK Ultra comes with the same eight-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor but ups the BPU's performance to a claimed 96 TOPS — almost ten times that of the RDK X5, which was in turn offered twice the machine learning and artificial intelligence performance of the RDK X3.

More information on the RDK X5 is available on the D-Robotics website, while DFRobot (no relation) has hardware listed for pre-order at a discounted $59.50 (RRP $70) for the 4GB variant and $76.50 (RRP $90) for the 8GB variant. Information on the upcoming RDK Ultra is available on the official product page, exclusively in Chinese at the time of writing, with more on the compay's wiki, while early distributor listings suggest a CNY4,999 (around $700) retail price with carrier board as the Horizon Robotics Developer Kit.