MediaTek Announces the Octa-Core Genio 700, an Edge AI System-on-Chip for the Internet of Things
Designed to sit between the Genio 1200 and Genio 500, the new Genio 700 sacrifices a little performance but still packs a punch.
MediaTek has announced another entry in its Genio family of Internet of Things (IoT) system-on-chips, the Genio 700 — an octa-core part targeting smart home and the industrial IoT (IIoT).
"When we launched the Genio family of IoT products last year, we designed the platform with the scalability and development support that brands need, paving the way for opportunities to continue expanding," claims MediaTek's Richard Lu, vice president of the company's IoT business unit. "With a focus on industrial and smart home products, the Genio 700 is a perfect natural addition to the line-up to ensure we can provide the widest range of support possible to our customers."
MediaTek launched the Genio range in May last year with the unveiling of the Genio 1200, a range-topping part that goes hand-in-hand with the Genio open-platform software development kit to provide a route into the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) sector. The range-topping chip boasted four Arm Cortex-A78 and four Cortex-A55 CPU cores, an Arm Mali-G57 MC5 graphics processor, and an in-house dual-core AI coprocessor with a claimed 4.8 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of compute performance.
At the time, the company only detailed three other models on the Genio roadmap: the mid-range Genio 500, low-power computer vision Genio 350, and audio-focused entry-level Genio 130. Its announcement this week adds another string to the Genio bow in the form of the Genio 700, boasting eight cores like its range-topping sibling but sitting lower down in the overall line-up.
The Genio 700 features two Arm Cortex-A78 CPU cores running at 2.2GHz and six lower-power Cortex-A55 cores running at 2GHz while the GPU is an Arm Mali-G57 MC3, a step down from the higher-performance Genio 1200, and while it still includes MediaTek's proprietary AI coprocessor the performance has been dialed down to 4 TOPS. Elsewhere on the chip are high-speed peripheral interfaces including PCI Express Gen. 2, USB 3.2 Gen. 1, gigabit Ethernet, and MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI), plus support for dual displays — one offering 4k60 resolution and the other topping out at 1080p60.
On the software front, the part is — naturally — supported in MediaTek's Genio platform and includes support for the NeuroPilot software development kit for edge AI workloads, comes with Arm SystemReady and PSU certification, and the promise of ten-year availability. For operating systems, MediaTek provides board support packages for the Yocto project, Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, and Google's Android.
MediaTek is to showcase the latest Genio chip at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, but has stated that it won't be commercially available until the second quarter of the year — at an as-yet unannounced price point. More information is available on the company website.
