MediaTek is well-regarded for its outstanding system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions for the mobile and consumer device markets, and it has also become an important innovation force in the smartphone market to promote the development of more advanced and higher-performance SoC designs. Every year, MediaTek launches a variety of chipsets to meet the needs of the mobile market. One of the leaders is Breguet 9000 flagship mobile platform, which uses advanced Armv9 CPU and Mali GPU technologies to bring excellent performance and performance to flagship smartphone devices.

The success of smart phone chip products helps MediaTek further seize market opportunities and provide a pioneering next-generation computing platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) market, covering enterprises and industries. This is not only the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and IoT infrastructure, but also part of MediaTek's efforts to become a global semiconductor company providing a diversified technology industry solution.

In line with smartphone chips, the market continues to pursue high-end IoT products with both performance and efficiency, and advanced technologies in AI, image processing, computer vision (CV), and communication functions. In addition, as single-board computers (SBC) for the high-end IoT market continue to evolve for computing needs, the pioneering force it brings has matured and helped maintain the steady growth of market demand for computing.

MediaTek Genio Smart IoT AIoT Platform-Born for the High End

MediaTek saw the market and demand changes behind these innovations and released the new AIoT chip portfolio-Genio. On this platform, MediaTek have implemented various new functions specifically for enterprise and AIoT industrial applications, including supporting 1.6mm industrial circuit board design, Yocto Linux, and providing product life cycle support for up to ten years. By providing a complete platform solution for the AIoT market, MediaTek hope to help partners bring innovative consumer, enterprise and industrial applications and devices to market as soon as possible.

As the flagship chip platform of the MediaTek AIoT product portfolio, Genio 1200 is designed based on Cortex-A78, Cortex-A55 CPU and Mali-G57 GPU for a wide range of AIoT applications. With the advantage of energy efficiency, partners can use simpler thermal design and significantly reduce product costs, which makes Genio 1200 popular in industrial applications and equipment. And its multimedia function can also provide more abundant applications for intelligent retail, warehouse management and intelligent home. In addition, the Genio 1200 uses a Mali-G57 that supports strong graphics capabilities and can drive two 4K displays at a 60Hz refresh rate, which makes the Genio 1200 suitable for digital billboard and visual retail applications.

(Photo from Advantech)

Insights into the next two to three years as the market continues to evolve, the industry's demand for higher performance products will become increasingly strong. With its flagship product Genio 1200, MediaTek seeks to embrace new market prospects in the AIoT field with higher product performance. Richard Lu, deputy general manager of MediaTek's AIoT division, said that all this is to "get ahead of the technology wave". "The market is changing quickly, so we have to be ready in advance," he explains. "We want to launch a higher-end product to meet the future market. We know that as the market evolves, the demand for higher performance will increase."

In addition to higher performance, MediaTek have also built a variety of new technologies and functions in Genio 1200, including AI, image processing units (ISP), computer vision (CV), and greater connectivity. Advances in AI technology are particularly important, especially edge AI technology that is currently widely used in the AIoT field. In fact, the combination of performance, networking and AI makes the Genio 1200 an attractive solution for robotics applications.

Richard Lu added: "Industrial OEMs always want to make their products more competitive, which means more AI, ISP, CV, connectivity and edge computing capabilities. Combining all of this into a complete solution, such as Genio 1200, saves our partners development time and costs, and differentiates MediaTek products in the market."

As part of the promise of a complete platform stack for the AIoT market, it is still not enough to develop outstanding hardware. MediaTek want standards and software compatibility to ensure that partners can integrate seamlessly and smoothly.

"Given that there are already many companies and solutions in the AIoT market, standardization is a major focus for MediaTek. We must ensure that the Genio 1200 is compatible with many existing IoT standards. That's why it's so important for us that the hardware is compliant with Arm's Project Cassini specifications, because Project Cassini provide standardization for the industry," says Richard Lu."

Mohamed Awad, vice president of Arm's Internet of Things and Embedded Division, pointed out at the Embedded World Exhibition held in June: "Project Cassini has implemented key industry standards to ensure that cloud-native software can be safely deployed on all Arm-based devices in the IoT field. MediaTek hardware meets the specifications of Project Cassini, allowing partners to bring their products to market faster, so they can focus on innovation instead of dedicate time to resolving compatibility issues."

For MediaTek, Arm's strong open source community resources are of great interest because it means real-time updates and support for Linux and Android operating systems (OS). Richard Lu added: "The Arm ecosystem of open source collaborators makes IoT developers much easier. It provides an open development environment and benefits our Genio platform for the AIoT market."

MediaTek Genio Smart Internet of Things AIoT Platform Empowers Advantech SBC

Genio's 1200 cooperation is not limited to MediaTek and Arm. Advantech, an IoT enterprise that has performed well in the fields of intelligent systems, embedded computing and systems, and industrial computing, has installed Genio 1200 chips on its RSB-3810 SBC, which is aimed at all industrial IoT applications, especially vision-based applications. Given its expertise in industrial computing, Advantech is leveraging its expertise to create attractive products for various IoT markets.

(Photo from Advantech)

Regarding the selection of MediaTek Genio 1200, Thomas Kaminski, Director of Product Sales Management of Yanhua Technology, said: "Our huge product portfolio must cover many different applications from the strong growth of IoT and AIoT markets. Choosing the right SoC partner is an important milestone in our product development process. We must meet the needs of the technology market while respecting the needs of our industrial customers. For MediaTek, AI and video performance combined with computing power from the Arm Cortex-A78 and A55 core means that its chipset is ideal for a variety of computer vision applications, especially edge applications."

"For intelligent vision applications, we need AI-capable technology to detect objects, objects, processes, or faces, then stream the data to edge processing, and finally display it on a high-resolution video screen. That's why the Genio 1200 is a perfect fit for our new RSB-3810 single board computer, as it delivers low power consumption, high graphics and AI performance, while being cost-effective and delivering on MediaTek long-term commitment to our industrial markets and customers."

Kaminski also recognize the role that Arm's technology plays in Genio 1200-it provides the performance required for high-end IoT applications while being easy to deploy on hardware.

He explains: "Arm-based SoC hardware development is more challenging today than in the past. The Arm-based SoC supports a new generation of memory and storage while providing high-speed I/O interfaces. These technology development steps from Arm mean that we can collect, transmit and process data faster and open the door to many new applications. In Genio 1200 chipset, the high performance of Arm IP means that we can meet the higher performance requirements of industrial IoT applications, especially Mali-G57 GPU, which can provide higher drawing performance, fast response and AI functions, which are indispensable for current high-end AIoT visual architecture applications."

However, the lack of hardware and firmware standardization across SoCs can also hinder the deployment of edge computing applications. The risk that customers bear is that they may be forced to choose a certain SoC platform for application development and use all the energy of software development on this platform. It is economically infeasible to carry out further software development on another SoC platform. Therefore, in order to make the fragmented market more standardized, Advantech has already used hardware conforming to Project Cassini specifications on several computer boards to reduce the complexity of software deployment, at the same time improve safety.

In addition, for RSB-3810 SBC,MediaTek and Advantech are also working with British Business Energy (Canonical) to ensure that customers can use Ubuntu, the Linux operating system, on the new SBC platform. Ubuntu OS is the new standardized and high-security enterprise Linux for servers, desktops, cloud and developers, saving Advantech customers time and money.

Kaminski said: "It's great to have Ubuntu Linux support on this platform. Producing Linux image files for RISC usually requires a lot of effort, and it takes more effort to ensure that image files are safe and up-to-date throughout the product lifecycle. The use of Ubuntu image files provided by Advantech allows our customers to get started immediately and significantly shorten the time to market. As Ubuntu benefits from regular patches and updates and extended maintenance options that the British Business Section can provide, life cycle management becomes very simple."

Genio 1200 represents the first collaboration between MediaTek and Advantech in the IoT market. So far, the feedback from Advantech's customers and developer ecosystem has been quite positive.

Kaminski said: "Due to MediaTek extensive experience with consumer devices and the excellent power efficiency of the Genio 1200 chipset, many IoT and embedded developers are eager to obtain product details and have begun to request samples!"

MediaTek, Arm, Advantech and the broader Arm ecosystem are the start of a new era of pioneering computing platforms for the high-end AIoT market. It will redefine what is possible at the edge and drive the development of more exceptional products in the evolving and rapidly evolving AIoT field.