Amlogic’s New contenders, are they enough?

Amlogic introduced their first SOC of the new generation (S905) a few months ago, and it took the market by storm.

With it’s built-in 10 bit color depth HEVC hardware support, it brought a much asked for feature to this busy market, and at a low price than the market leaders (S812) – even though the performance in games and apps was also not as powerful.

Now we get information regarding a new iteration of the S905 – the S905X (previously S905M).

What does it bring to the mix? a few things. In the case of the upgraded budget oriented S905X SOC:

• HDMI 2.0a (for the HDR support)
• HDR10 support
• REC709/BT2020 processing (10 Bit color depth for better color fidelity and banding reduction),
• Supports up to 2GB DDR3/4, DDR3L, LPDDR2, LPDDR3 with dual ranks
• Integrated IEEE 802.3 10/100/1000M Gigabit Ethernet MAC controller with RGMII interface
• Integrated 10/100M PHY interface
• Supports Energy Efficiency Ethernet (EEE) mode
• Integrated CI+ port and ISO 7816 smart card controller

 

And in the case of the new flagship SOC (on top of the features mentioned for the S905X):

• Octa core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU up to 2 GHz (DVFS) with two CPU clusters one optimized for high performance (big) and the other for low power (LITTLE)
• ARM Mali-T820MP3 GPU up to 750MHz (DVFS) with 3 shader engines supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.03.1, DirectX 11 FL9_3, OpenCL 1.1/1.2 full profile and RenderScript.
• Video Post-Processing Engine – Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HLG HDR processing, motion adaptive 3D noise reduction filter, advanced motion adaptive edge enhancing de-interlacing engine, 3:2 pull-down support, deblocking filters, etc..
• Video Output
  • Built-in HDMI 2.0a transmitter including both controller and PHY with 3D, CEC, HDR and HDCP 2.2, 4Kx2K@60 max resolution output
  • CVBS 480i/576i standard definition output
  • RGB888 TTL interface up to 1920×1080
• Camera Interface – ITU 601/656 parallel video input with down-scalar, supports camera input as YUV422, RGB565,16bit RGB or JPEG

If these new chips came out together with their early brother – the S905, they would have quickly become the new kings of the hill, and the other chipset manufacturers (Rockchip mainly, but also HiSilicon and others) would have had to play some catch-up.

But, as it is, Rockchip is quick on the S905’s tail, and new boxes featuring their latest hits are expected to show up as early as the next month or two. And these are no poor-man versions either. Rockchip’s RK3288 already shows muscle and 10 bit support, but the newer RK3229 and others may hinder Amlogic’s continued rule over most of the Kodi boxes market.