We have new information about the future Amlogic S905X4 SoC, which will be the substitute for the popular S905X3 that we are seeing in countless TV-Boxes today. This new chip comes to definitively replace the current Amlogic SoC since it allows us full compatibility with Android TV 10 and Google’s directives to reproduce content.
The new Amlogic S905X4 SoC is very similar at the hardware level, we have four Cortex-A55 cores and a Mali-G31 MP2 GPU almost identical to the S905X3. As we can see in the following list, the most important changes are in other aspects.
- Small power increase from 19700 DMIPS to 21800 DMIPS (we’ll see in the real world)
- Vulkan 1.1 (if activated in firmware)
- RSA crypto support
- NPU is removed or optional
- Support AV1 video decoding (the future of streaming)
- Audio enhancement with DSP 2xHiFi4 support
- HDCP 2.3 support (8K compatible and HDMI 2.1 functions)
All these changes are designed to have hardware support for the needs of Android 10, an important point to obtain Google certification on devices that want official global distribution or meet for future Netflix validation. The most interesting change is in the AV1 hardware support that gives us compatibility with the future codec system of Youtube, Prime Video or Netflix as we saw in our Article on the AV1 codec.
We can perhaps expect new TV-Boxes based on the new S905X4 by the end of the year if everything goes back to normal after the global disease of the coronavirus. Without a doubt this SoC can be an excellent platform for a new updated Xiaomi Mi Box or other products that await these new hardware features. With the jump to Android 10, luckily Amlogic will finally be forced to offer its system in 64bit, something already mandatory.
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