Mediatek's Genio Is Out of The Bottle

MediaTek has created a new brand for its embedded application processors. The family includes older rebranded chips but introduces a new flagship model, the Genio 1200, for AI IoT applications.

Bryon Moyer

MediaTek has created a new brand, Genio, for its embedded application processors. The family includes older rebranded chips but introduces a new flagship model called the Genio 1200 (G1200). In so doing, the company is repositioning itself for the AIoT, which originally meant “application processors for the IoT” but increasingly means “artificial intelligence of things.”

The G1200 is the largest of the family, boasting eight Arm Cortex-A cores, five GPU cores, a HiFi 4 audio DSP, and a deep-learning accelerator (DLA). The CPUs clock at 2.2GHz, with the GPU cluster running at 800MHz. The DLA can deliver 4.8 trillion operations per second (TOPS). TDP is under 8W, making this a high-end IoT chip for line-powered systems. Production units are scheduled to ship in 2H22.

DLAs have become an essential component of premium IoT processors alongside video, audio, and display engines. The Genio 1200 targets vision-based AI workloads for edge devices. Typical applications include retail kiosks, industrial monitoring, smart parking, and security cameras.

MediaTek’s initial focus was on smartphone processors. As non-phone applications for similar parts emerged, the company disabled irrelevant blocks to create IoT products. The company could then create a reduced-size mask set for the chips that achieve suitable volumes. The result has been a collection of products that address IoT applications, offering low to moderate processing for line-powered and even battery-powered edge devices. The largest models have a small DLA.

As IoT opportunities jelled, MediaTek decided on a new brand to encompass these older devices. Although the Genio 1200 is a new silicon design, it reuses several intellectual-property (IP) blocks from the company’s smartphone chips while adding IoT I/O connections.