MediaTek announces the MT9638, a 4K-capable TV SoC

MediaTek may be known mostly for its smartphone SoCs but the company is doing chips for all kinds of electronics. Today, the Taiwanese-based maker announces its MT9638 chipset for 4K TVs.

But 4K is far from being the only neat feature. The chipset can also do a bunch of AI-powered stuff like super resolution, picture quality and voice assistant. The infamous MEMC feature is also on board but the variable refresh rate is arguably the most important feature for gamers.

A quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 CPU is running the show at up to 1.5GHz. Aside from the standard CPU, there's also a dedicated APU, which stands for "AI processing unit". And with the help of a GPU (Mali-G52 MC1), the chip can do real-time content and scene recognition adjusting the saturation, brightness, sharpness, and noise reduction on the fly.

The AI super resolution, on the other hand, upscales the resolution of a video to the native 4K and in combination with the MEMC tech, you get smoother higher-res videos.

Some of the most important specs include 4K@60fps playback with support for HEVC, VP9 and AV1. HDR10+ is also on the list with support for up to 2304 backlight dimming zones. Dolby Atmos and DTS Virtual X are included for improved sound experience.

In terms of connectivity, the chip features HDMI 2.1a, USB 3.0 and Wi-Fi 6.

The chip is supposed to make it into final products in Q2 2021.

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