Renesas Promises High-Efficiency Edge AI, Computer Vision for Your Next Robot with the RZ/V2H
With four Linux-capable CPU cores, two real-time cores, a microcontroller, and high-efficiency accelerators, the RZ/V2H is a powerhouse.
Embedded electronics specialist Renesas has announced a new entry in its RZ microprocessor range, targeting high-performance robotics applications with support for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads: the RZ/V2H, delivering up to 80 tera-operations per second (TOPS) under passive cooling.
"As a market leader in motor control microprocessors, Renesas is ready to take on the next challenge to drive the advancement of the robotics market with AI technology," claims Renesas' Daryl Khoo of the company's latest processor launch. "The RZ/V2H will facilitate the development of next-generation autonomous robots with vision AI capabilities, that have the ability to think independently and control movements in real time."
Joining the company's existing RZ family, the RZ/V2H boasts 6MB of memory shared between four 64-bit Arm Cortex-A55 CPU cores running at up to 1.8GHz, two Cortex-R8 cores running at up to 800MHz for real-time workloads, a Cortex-M33 microprocessor "sub-core," and Renesas' latest in-house Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor (DRP) accelerator, the DRP-AI3.
It's the latter which delivers the company's impressive claim of up to 80 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute for computer vision and edge AI workloads — without, it says, requiring active cooling, thanks to a 10 TOPS per watt (TOPS/W) power efficiency representing an entire order of magnitude improvement over its previous-generation counterpart.
Alongside the DRP-AI3 is an application-specific accelerator designed specifically for the OpenCV computer vision platform, delivering a claimed sixteenfold performance gain over running the same workload on the CPU alone. To showcase the chip's edge AI capabilities further, Renesas is also releasing pre-trained models and a software development kit targeting the RZ/V2H — accessible, the company claims, "even if [you] do not have extensive knowledge of AI."
As is usual for the company, the launch of the RZ/V2H comes with a "Winning Combination" — a reference design which pulls in other Renesas parts to provide an idea of how the chip can be used. This time, it's a "Visual Detection Single Board Computer" which uses camera inputs to analyze its environment and determine its movements in real-time.
The RZ/V2H is now available direct from Renesas at $108.69 for single-unit quantities; more information is available on the company website.