2025.11.03
AI Compute Is More Than the Main SoC! A Clear Look at RK1820's Real Role in the RK3588 System
Why are more and more edge devices talking about NPUs and coprocessors? The RK3588 is already a powerful 6 TOPS (INT8) SoC, yet in complex scenes such as multi-task inference, model parallelism and video-AI analytics the compute ceiling of a single chip is still there. RK1820 was created exactly to take over that slice of load and relieve the main SoC’s “compute anxiety”. In edge-AI equipment the host processor no longer fights alone; when AI tasks outgrow the scheduling capacity of the traditional CPU/NPU, the coprocessor quietly steps in and assumes part of the intelligent workload.