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Renesas has announced a new chip in its RZ/V family, aimed at accelerating OpenCV and other machine learning workloads for low-power computer vision at the edge: the RZ/V2MA microprocessor, built with the Apache TVM compiler stack in mind.

The new Renesas RZ/V2MA is built around two 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 processor cores running at up to 1GHz plus an artificial intelligence coprocessor dubbed the DRP-AI and offering one trillion operations per second (TOPS) of compute performance per watt of power translating, in real-world terms, to a performance of 52 frames per second for the TinyYoloV3 network.

Renesas' latest chip aims to provide enough grunt for real-time edge-vision workloads in a low power envelope. (: Renesas)

In addition to the DRP-AI coprocessor, the chip also offers an accelerator specifically focused on OpenCV workloads improving performance for rule-based image processing, which can happen simultaneously alongside networks running on the DRP-AI.

On the software side, Renesas has a DRP-AI Translator, which offers conversion for ONNX and PyTorch models to enable them to run on the DRP-AI core, with TensorFlow support to follow; the company has also announced the DRP-AI TVM, built atop the open-source Apache TVM deep learning compiler stack, which allows for programs to be compiled to run on both the DRP-AI accelerator and one or both CPU cores.

"One of the challenges for embedded systems developers who want to implement machine learning is to keep up with the latest AI models that are constantly evolving," claims Shigeki Kato, vice president of Renesas' enterprise infrastructure division. "With the new DRP-AI TVM tool, we are offering designers the option to expand AI frameworks and AI models that can be converted to executable formats, allowing them to bring the latest image recognition capabilities to embedded devices using new AI models.

The RZ/V2MA also offers support for H.264 and H.265 video codecs, LPDDR4 memory at up to 3.2Gbps bandwidth, USB 3.1 connectivity, and two lanes of PCI Express. To showcase its capabilities, Renesas has used the chip in the Vision AI Gateway Solution reference design, which includes Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and cellular LTE Cat-M1 connectivity.

More information on the RZ/V2MA is available on the Renesas website.

Read more:
Renesas Launches RZ/V2MA Microprocessor with Deep Learning and OpenCV Acceleration Engines - Hackster.io