MediaTek is one of the leading suppliers of chips for smart TVs. The company officially announced the S900 chip around July last year. Later in November 2019, it disclosed that the chip has entered mass production at TSMC’s foundry.

According to Chinese bog IThomes, MediaTek has hinted that the chip which will power 8K smart TVs is now ready to ship to OEMs. The MediaTek S900 8K TV chip has already featured on its first 8K TV and that is the Skyworth Q91 8K TV which was announced at CES 2020 in January. We may likely see a few more OEMs utilise the chip but it isn’t likely going to spread like wildfire considering the sky-high prices for 8K TVs and unavailability of 8K contents for such TVs.

As a reminder, the MediaTek S900 is manufactured using 12 nm FinFET process and it consists of a multi-core CPU comprising of ARM Cortex-A73 cores, and Mali-G52 GPU that supports 8K video decoding, HDR10+ and external graphics which enable customers (OEMs in this case) to customize their products. In terms of I/O support, the chipset supports HDMI 2.1A, which offers a maximum bandwidth of 48Gps — enough to deliver HDR10+ content, as well as 4K videos running at 120Hz or 8K videos at 60Hz.

The MediaTek S900 also supports AI PQ, short for Artificial Intelligence Picture Quality. With the combination of MediaTek’s proprietary MiraVision-Pro and AI PQ, the S900 supports AI scene recognition, enabling S900-powered TVs to improve picture quality by optimizing colour saturation, brightness, sharpness, dynamic motion compensation and picture noise, even for native 8K output.

MediaTek has already provided a NeuroPilot software development kit (SDK) for the chipset which allows developers to build apps for the platform. TVs powered by this chipset, when equipped with other necessary components can act as a hub for controlling smart home or IoT devices via voice and gesture controls.

 

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