Recently, during an institutional research interview, Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd. (Rockchip) stated that its next-generation flagship chip, RK3688, is currently under development. The CPU of RK3688 is expected to reach 300K DMIPS, the GPU 2 TFLOPS, and it will have a built-in 32 TOPS NPU (the specification is subject to adjustment based on market changes or requirements). Its comprehensive performance will be significantly improved compared to RK3588. The two chips have different positioning—RK3688 is not a replacement for RK3588 but a complementary product.
RK3688 is designed to cater to AIoT application scenarios where RK3588 requires higher processing performance upgrades, such as in-vehicle intelligent systems for smart cockpits, high-performance computing for edge terminals, "brain" computing for various robots, and ARM-based PC mobile computing. This chip will enhance the product positioning of Rockchip’s AIoT chip platform in the high-end segment, and together with RK3588, further form a tiered product sequence in the high-end market. This will meet the diverse chip selection needs of customers for terminal devices at different tiers, which require differentiated performance.
Rockchip also mentioned that its end-side computing power coprocessor series is an innovative solution developed by the company to address the dynamic balance of computing power, storage capacity, and transmission capacity in AIoT end-side model deployment. The company’s newly launched RK182X is the first product in this series; it can serve as the computing power center of automotive cockpits and support the deployment of end-side multimodal models with up to 7B parameters. For example, based on Rockchip’s RK3588M + RK182X smart cockpit AI Box solution, the computing power of the cockpit platform can be flexibly expanded to enable intelligent recognition of visual scenarios inside and outside the cockpit—such as preceding vehicle recognition, real-time interpretation of traffic signs, eye tracking, child danger detection, and spatial gesture sensing. This comprehensively improves driving safety and the riding experience.
According to introductions, the end-side computing power coprocessor RK182X series features high computing power and high bandwidth. It can be used with main control chips to efficiently support the deployment of mainstream end-side large models with parameters such as 3B and 7B. It mainly targets application scenarios including automotive cockpits, machine vision, smart homes, education, office and conferences, robots, edge gateways, and industrial intelligent manufacturing. Currently, the first batch of customers for several product lines is already conducting development work.
(Reprinted from https://news.eccn.com/）