System on Chip (SoC)

A complete computing system on one chip, integrating a CPU, GPU, and AI accelerator.

A system on chip integrates a CPU, a GPU, a neural processing unit (NPU, a compute block specialized for neural networks), memory controllers, video encode/decode, and various interfaces all on the same die; a phone's chip is a typical SoC. Most robot onboard compute platforms are also SoCs: small and low-power, which suits a battery-powered robot body. Choosing one mainly comes down to AI compute (often expressed in TOPS), memory bandwidth, and power draw. NVIDIA's Jetson Orin/Thor, Rockchip's RK3588, and D-Robotics' RDK S100 all fall into this category, usually delivered as a compute module plus a carrier board.

ExampleThe core of an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin module is an SoC integrating an Arm CPU with an Ampere-architecture GPU, and it's commonly used as the onboard compute platform in humanoid and quadruped robots.

Also called

SoC

Related

Onboard Compute Platform · NVIDIA Jetson · Rockchip RK3588 · Neural Processing Unit (NPU) · TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second) · System-on-Module (SoM) / Carrier Board / Developer Kit

Sources

System on a chip - Wikipedia