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Will 2022 be the year of low-cost 8K TV? This is not a very far-reaching hypothesis given the recent technological changes and the new MediaTek chip
2021 was, at least in Italy, the year of Smart TV: the beginning of the transition to the new standard of second-generation digital terrestrial television prompted Italians to get rid of millions of old receivers and buy millions of next-generation TVs. Therefore, in Italy, we can expect a decline in sales of smart and connected TVs in 2022: those who wanted or had to change their TVs have already done so this year.
However, the same cannot be said for the rest of the world, where there has not been as much technical change as in Italy, but the electronics industry has nevertheless not remained static and has constantly presented new technical solutions and new, increasingly advanced models. In 2021, the first mini LED TVs hit the market, just to give one example. In turn, 2022 will probably witness the appearance of the first Smart TVs with a new chip: Pentonic 2000 from MediaTek, which the Taiwanese giant has just presented. The Pentonic 2000 is a Smart TV processor with great potential, at least on paper.
MediaTek Pentonic 2000: what it can do
The new Pentonic 2000 from MediaTek is a processor that has been developed with 8K in mind. It may sound absurd, considering that 8K content can now be counted on the fingers of one hand, but the peculiarity of this system is that it can handle an 8K 120 Hz stream, complete with MEMC, without performance problems.
MEMC stands for “Movement E-stimation Movement Compensation” and it is a technology that in practice allows you to create additional frames in order to increase the refresh rate of the played video, while increasing the impression of smooth content. Applying MEMC technology to an 8K 120Hz video stream requires a lot of power, which MediaTek Pentonic 2000 claims to possess.
According to MediaTek, the Pentonic 2000 has the most powerful CPU and GPU in the entire Smart TV industry. So it would be (and we will see if it is true) a more powerful system than the famous Samsung Quantum Processor, LG Alpha 9 or Sony XR. In addition, MediaTek Pentonic 2000 is designed to be able to use UFS 3.1 memory (the same memory used in top smartphones).
This technical detail is very important as it enables a real innovation that will come to TVs equipped with the new MediaTek chip: picture-in-picture streaming applications. The large 8K screen has enough space to display four 4K streams simultaneously. The MediaTek chip promises to do just that by showing video streams from multiple streaming apps running together on the same 8K screen (internet permitting, of course).
This means you can watch, say, both Amazon Prime Video and Disney + or Netflix on the same screen simultaneously. Or, watch a single stream while watching another app on a different part of the screen. But that’s not all: different image enhancement algorithms can be applied separately to each video stream. So, to give a basic example, we can see the HDR stream next to the non-HDR stream.
Finally, the new MediaTek Pentonic 2000 can hardware decode both the codecs used by streaming platforms today and those that will be used tomorrow, such as AV1 (Netflix started using it a few weeks ago) or VVC H.266 (successor to H .265, which we will be using in Italy after the end of DVB-T2 shutdown).
Smart TVs 2022
MediaTek claims that the first Smart TV equipped with the Pentonic 2000 will hit the market in 2022, which means it has already started receiving orders from Smart TV manufacturers. We are unlikely to see Pentonic 2000 on Samsung, LG or Sony TVs that use proprietary chips and operating systems, but we will definitely see it in the long line of Smart TV with Android TV.
Xiaomi, Hisense, TCL will probably be the first brands to use this new processor. It will start with the highest range, as an 8K screen is needed to really take advantage of this processor, but we cannot rule out that MediaTek will soon present a power-free Pentonic 2000 version designed for 4K TVs.
However, it is certain that the Pentonic 2000 will be a chip produced in large numbers (MediaTek is the world’s largest manufacturer of smartphones and wants to be the first for TVs as well), thanks to which its price will be lower than competing chips, which will benefit people buyers of new top 2022 Smart TVs.
