RenderScript is a high-performance computation API that allows apps to run operations with automatic parallelization across CPU and GPU cores. It provides access to these features without needing to write code for different architectures or processor types. RenderScript code is compiled at runtime, so apps do not need to be recompiled for different devices. The document provides an overview of RenderScript and its system, basic usage, entry points, variables, pointers, memory management, and comparisons with OpenGL ES. It also includes examples of using RenderScript for single-image sampling, multi-image sampling, multi-pass effects, and generating a histogram.