MediaTek Unveils Its New Genio 720 And Genio 520 IoT Chips (Yes, There’s AI Too)

MediaTek has come a long way since powering some of the weakest phones of the mid-2010s. The company’s chips are powering some of the most powerful phones and tablets on the market. Well, it’s taking a leap to a new platform. MediaTek just unveiled the new Genio 720 and Genio 520 IoT chips. Of course, there had to be an emphasis on AI with its announcement.

The company introduced these chips during Embedded World. Right now, we don’t know what devices will use these chipsets. Companies typically announce chips months before we see devices running them, so we’ll need to wait to see if they’re the innovation that MediaTek says they are.

What do the Genio 720 and Genio 520 have to offer?

A primary focus of these chipsets is efficiency. This is important because many IoT device have to remain plugged in, so it’s important that they sip power. Also, you’ll want to make sure that battery-powered devices last as long as possible.

Both the Genio 720 and Genio 520 use two Arm Cortex-A78 CPUs and six Cortex-A55 CPUs. This means that they’re pretty power-efficient. According to the company, these chips are perfect for smart displays, smart retail devices, HMI applications, and other multi-window or interactive applications. The list goes on, as they’re able to scale to whatever you need them to do.

As you could have guessed, the MediaTek Genio 720 and Genio 520 have a focus on AI. The company boasts that these chips offer up to 10 TOPS of performance. Also, they use its 8th-gen NPU, which offers hardware acceleration. The 16GB of LPDDR5 memory makes them ideal for different LLMs including Gemini, Phi, Llama, and Deepseek’s models. This paves the way for more IoT devices to use on-device AI without needing to contact the cloud.

IoT devices sometimes collect data about you and your surroundings. So, it’s never comfortable when they need to contact the cloud. However, imagine a completely offline smartphone ecosystem that has powerful AI. It will do wonders for privacy.

It looks like MediaTek wants to take this market by storm, and we’re all excited to see where it’s going.