MediaTek is to enter the flagship smart TV market, with the announcement of its Pentonic 2000 chipset presenting aspirations beyond its flagship mobile (Dimensity) and computing (Kompanio) platforms.
After announcing the all-new Dimensity 9000 flagship chip for smartphones, MediaTek has now unveiled the Pentonic 2000 SoC for next-gen smart TVs. The new chip is built with TSMC’s 7nm advanced process technology, and it’s powerful enough to support 8K 120Hz displays.
Pentonic 2000 is the world’s first commercial TV chip manufactured using TSMC’s N7 (7nm-class) process, delivering unparalleled performance and power efficiency. This all-in-one chip supports 8K 120Hz displays, and can even support 144Hz for gaming PC hardware and the ninth generation of consoles.
The chip’s built-in high-performance MediaTek APU (AI processor) powers MediaTek’s new 8K AI-Super Resolution technology that intelligently upscales lower-resolution content to the display’s native resolution, while also performing real-time image quality enhancements.
With MediaTek’s Intelligent View technology, the chip supports multiple picture-in-picture (PiP) or picture-by-picture (PbP) screens, allowing a large 8K resolution display to showcase a display wall of different media sources. This means that consumers can have multiple apps open and stream from different sources, all at the same time.
Inside the chip is the TV industry’s fastest CPU and GPU, which is fueled by an ultra-wide memory bus and ultra-fast UFS 3.1 storage. MediaTek Wi-Fi 6E or even 5G cellular modems can be used by device makers to provide the fastest wireless internet connectivity for 8K streaming media, or up to multiple streamed sources displayed at once.
Pentonic 2000 is the first commercial 8K TV chip with Versatile Video Coding (VVC) H.266 media support, which offers improved compression efficiency – something that is essential for today’s streaming era. Pentonic 2000 supports Dolby’s latest imaging and audio technologies to provide the ultimate cinematic experiences in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. Additionally, the chip supports AV1 for streaming services and all global TV broadcast standards including the latest ATSC 3.0.
MediaTek says that next-generation 8K smart TVs featuring the new Pentonic 2000 SoC will reach consumers by Q2 2022. Given that the trademark was registered back in 2019, it’s clearly been a long time in the works.
