RenderScript was introduced in Honeycomb in 2011 with a strong focus on graphics capabilities, hence the name. The graphics engine part of RenderScript has, however, been deprecated since Android 4.1 JellyBean. Although it has kept its name, RenderScript has deeply evolved to emphasize its "compute engine". It is similar to technologies such as OpenCL and CUDA, with an emphasis on portability and usability.
More specifically, RenderScript tries to abstract hardware specificities from the programmer and extract the maximum raw power from it. Instead of taking the least common denominator, it optimizes code according to the platform it executes on at runtime. The final code can run on either the CPU or GPU, with an advantage of automatic parallelization managed by RenderScript.
The RenderScript framework is composed of a few elements:
A C-like language based on C99, which provides variables, functions, structures, and so on
A low level virtual machine (LLVM) based compiler...