MediaTek Kompanio 838 Chromebook Chipset With AI Capabilities, Pentonic 800 SoC for Smart TVs Unveiled

The company on Tuesday unveiled the MediaTek Kompanio 838 chipset for Chromebooks and the MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset for TVs and smart displays. The announcements were made during AMD's Computex 2024 event, where Nvidia, Asus, Gigabyte and other tech giants also made separate announcements. The Kompanio 838 chipset gets a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI computing and built-in support for AV1 video decoding. The Pentonic 800 SoC also features AI capabilities for faster performance and image quality improvements.

MediaTek Kompanio 838 is a 6nm octa-core processor, which marks an architecture upgrade over the Kompanio 520 SoC launched in 2022. The CPU consists of two 2.6 GHz Arm Cortex-A78 cores and six Arm Cortex -A55 with a maximum clock speed of 2.0 GHz. It is paired with the Arm Mali-G57 MC3 GPU and an unnamed NPU capable of handling four trillion operations per second (TOPS).

According to the company's press release, the Kompanio 838 chipset supports up to 64-bit LPDDR4X 3200MTs RAM and eMMC 5.1 storage. The company claims that this new architecture will provide better energy efficiency and offer all-day battery life.

MediaTek's latest Chromebook processor supports dual 4K displays and can also output the same resolution to a connected 4K smart TV or monitor. It also has hardware-accelerated AV1 video decoding built into the processor. For connectivity, it supports MediaTek Filogic Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E for both dual and tri-band options.

Designed for smart TVs, smart monitors, commercial displays and large embedded displays, the MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset arrives as the successor to the Pentonic 700. The quad-core CPU features Arm Cortex-A73 cores with maximum CPU performance of 1.8 GHz. The CPU is paired with the Arm Mali-G57 MC1 GPU along with a 3200Mbps 64-bit DDR4 RAM and an integrated AI processor.

The company claims that the AI ​​processing makes the chipset faster and more power efficient for AI tasks. AI-display technology is used to improve resolution and improve image quality. These include noise reduction, SDR to HDR upscaling, game optimization and more. For audio, it supports Dolby DAP with Atmos, Dolby Atmos FlexConnect and DTS: Virtual X.

As for the video decoding engine, the Pentonix 800 SoC supports popular key codecs such as HEVC, AV1, AVS3 High Profile and VVC (H.266). Using MediaTek Filogic, smart TV OEMs can add Wi-Fi 6, 6E or 7 wireless connectivity chipsets.