MediaTek Targets the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) With Genio Platform, Genio 1200 Launch
Available commercially later this year, the Genio 1200 is the first in a new family of edge AI embedded chips.
Embedded compute specialist MediaTek has announced a new system-on-chip, the Genio 1200, which it hopes will find a home in "premium" Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) designs — and a new open-platform software development kit, unsurprisingly named Genio, to go with it.
“As the industry enters the next era of innovation, MediaTek’s Genio platform delivers flexibility, scalability and development support brands need to cater to the latest market demands,” claims Jerry Yu of the launch. "We look forward to seeing the new user experiences brands bring to life with the Genio 1200 and its powerful AI capability, support for 4K displays and advanced imaging features."
The heart of the company's Genio offering, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is the open-platform software development kit that bears its name. Built atop the Yocto Linux project, the SDK is claimed to offer development requiring "minimal support" regardless of the type of application — while a developer portal provides access to tools and support designed to speed up development.
The software's not much use without hardware, and on this front MediaTek has an entire family of systems-on-chip (SoCs) planned out — starting with the Genio 1200, a "premium" part with four Arm Cortex-A78 and four Cortex-A55 CPU cores, an Arm Mali-G57 MC5 graphics processor, a video processor with 4k60 encode and decode support, a HiFi 4 digital signal processor (DSP), and the company's in-house dual-core AI coprocessor offering up to 4.8 TOPS of compute performance and INT8, INT16, and FP16 precision modes for edge AI workloads.
The Genio 1200 is only the first in the family, however, with MediaTek confirming three other models in the roadmap: the Genio 500, designed for retail and commercial Internet of Things (IoT) applications requiring high-performance edge processing; the Genio 350, designed for lighter computer vision workloads and voice processing at the edge; and the Genio 130, an audio-focused variant designed for low-power devices like cloud-supported voice assistant platforms.
MediaTek has not yet confirmed pricing for the Genio 1200, which will become available commercially in the second half of the year; neither has it offered a launch date for the other SoCs in the range. It has, however, launched its developer site in preparation.
More information on the Genio 1200 is available on the MediaTek website.
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