Rockchip NPU

Rockchip NPU generations, TOPS, supported data types and how to measure load.

Rockchip NPUs range from 0.5 TOPS (RV1106G2) to 6 TOPS (RK3588/RK3576, three cores on RK3588). They run INT8 models best; INT16/FP16 are supported with lower throughput. Real performance depends on operator support. Unsupported ops fall back to the CPU, so check the conversion log.

Key points

Check the driver version with cat /sys/kernel/debug/rknpu/version and live load with cat /sys/kernel/debug/rknpu/load.
On RK3588 you can pin a model to cores or run it across all three (core_mask).
Runtime (librknnrt.so) version must be compatible with the toolkit version that produced the .rknn file.

References

NPU guides

AI & NPUIntermediate

Convert YOLO to RKNN and Run It on the RK3588 NPU

Export YOLO to ONNX, quantise and convert it to .rknn with RKNN-Toolkit2 on an x86 host, then run it on the board with RKNN-Toolkit-Lite2, using all three RK3588 NPU cores.

10 min read · RK3588, RK3588S, RK3576

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