Renesas Electronics has begun sampling its R-Car X5H Gen 5 automotive system-on-chip and is now offering evaluation boards along with the R-Car Open Access (RoX) Whitebox Software Development Kit as it advances its software-defined vehicle platform toward broader adoption.
The company positions the R-Car X5H as a central compute device designed to run multiple vehicle domains simultaneously, including advanced driver assistance systems, in-vehicle infotainment, and gateway functions. Renesas says the chip is manufactured on a 3nm process node, which it describes as the first multi-domain automotive SoC built at that scale. The company claims up to 35 percent lower power consumption compared with previous 5nm solutions.
On the performance side, Renesas says the R-Car X5H delivers up to 400 TOPS of AI performance, with an option to scale further using chiplet extensions that can increase acceleration by four times or more. The SoC features 32 Arm Cortex-A720AE CPU cores, six Cortex-R52 lockstep cores with ASIL D support, and what the company describes as 4 TFLOPS equivalent GPU performance based on Manhattan 3.1 benchmark equivalence.
The RoX Whitebox SDK is built on Linux, Android, and the XEN hypervisor, with additional support for AUTOSAR, EB corbos Linux, QNX, Red Hat, and SafeRTOS. Renesas says the SDK integrates production-grade application software from partners including Candera, DSP Concepts, Nullmax, Smart Eye, STRADVISION, and ThunderSoft.
Bosch and ZF have both signaled support for the platform. Bosch plans to demonstrate the X5H’s fusion capabilities across multiple vehicle domains at CES 2026, while ZF says it will showcase a joint ADAS solution combining the chip with its software stack.
Renesas says silicon samples, evaluation boards, and the SDK are now shipping to select customers and partners.
