Taiwan-based fabless maker, MediaTek, has announced a new SoC, Pentonic 2000, for smart TV which will power flagship 8K TVs. The MediaTek Pentonic smart TV series is going to bring display and audio technologies to fast refresh rates, powerful AI capabilities, picture-in-picture streaming and more. Pentonic 2000 is the world’s first commercial TV chip manufactured using 7nm chipset. This chip supports 8K 120Hz displays, and can even support 144Hz for gaming PC hardware and the ninth generation of consoles. The new MediaTek Pentonic 2000 is expected to launch in the global market in 2022.
“MediaTek has built its multimedia expertise over the past two decades and is now the No. 1 chipset provider for smart TVs. The introduction of the Pentonic brand continues our legacy as we focus on pushing the boundaries of innovation in the smart TV market,” said Dr. Mike Chang, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Smart Home Business Group at MediaTek.
Pentonic 2000 is the first chip with an integrated 8K 120Hz MEMC engine. 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 compression efficiency. Pentonic 2000 supports Dolby’s latest imaging and audio technologies such as 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.
