Typically, a TV's display panel determines the minimum picture quality, while a good TV chip determines the achievable upper limit, especially on high-end TVs.
What is the best smart TV chip? Here is the complete ranking
In fact, the chip is the brain of the TV. A TV's chip will be responsible for three types of work: keeping the system and applications running, video decoding, and image processing.
To summarize, a TV isn't high-end if it uses a high-end chip, but a high-end TV must use a high-end chip. Therefore, when buying a TV, you need to pay attention to the internal processor. Precisely for this reason, today we are going to find out which are the best smart TV chips of 2023.
Before seeing the ranking of the best performing chips for our TVs, let's quickly find out where they come from.
Let's start with MediaTek. Besides being a well-known chip maker for smartphones, MediaTek is also a world leader in the global smart TV market. Almost all major TV manufacturers in the world have adopted MediaTek chip solutions, and its advantages are mainly reflected in performance and architecture, quality and image, IoT connection, control and interaction.
Amlogic, a company founded in the United States, mainly provides chip solutions for smart homes such as TVs and TV boxes. As a rising star in the field of chips, Amlogic has a highly optimized high-definition multimedia processing engine, and its chips are widely used in smart TVs and TV boxes.
Mstar (or Morning Star) is a Taiwanese enterprise, founded in May 2002. Morning Star has been involved in the field of smart TV chips for a long time. Its manufacturing process and R&D technology are quite mature, and it has defeated European chip giants such as Intel and Qualcomm.
In August 2012, MTK acquired Mstar and became the number one TV chip industry. At present, Mstar's latest flagship chip is Mstar 6A938 processor, which is often used in projectors.
Hisilicon of Huawei has been developing core chips for high-end smart TVs for many years. In the field of smart TVs, Huawei HiSilicon holds at least 50% of China's smart TV chip market. In addition to the improved design of 4K video, USB 3.0 and Gigabit network card, HiSilicon's ExpressX image processing engine is also very powerful.
Now let's look at the 2022 smart TV chip ranking. This table goes from worst to best chip, starting with MediaTek MT9632 in last position, then there is Huawei Hisilicon V560, Amlogic T972, MediaTek MT9638, Amlogic T982, Huawei Hisilicon V811 (Honghu 818), MediaTek MT9652 (MT9650), MediaTek MT9950, MediaTek 9970 / Pentonic 2000 and the Huawei HiSilicon V900 in the first position.
Going into detail, the MediaTek MT9632 is an entry-level chip for low-end TVs, usually with A53 quad-core architecture, and does not support VRR and ALLM technologies. Currently, this type of chip is relatively rare on the market. The models in which it is used are Honor Smart Screen X2 and OPPO TV K9 55 inches.
HiSilicon V560 is a low-end TV chip launched by Huawei. The main architecture is quad-core A55, it does not support 48Gbps bandwidth. Compared to the previous MT9632, the basic performance has improved. This chip is used in the Huawei Smart Screen SE series.
Among Amlogic's low-end models, the Amlogic T972 has the highest performance, the processor is manufactured in 12nm, and it can support 8K video decoding, but considering that 8K content is not many, the advantages are not obvious, and moreover does not support dynamic MEMC compensation. For the rest it is a quad-core A55 1.9Ghz for mid-range products.
The MediaTek MT9638 is a powerful A55 1.5Ghz quad-core chip, comes with dynamic MEMC compensation, can support hardware backlight partition, and has some improvement in boot speed; most series Xiaomi TV ES currently uses this chip. Thus, the Mi TV ES can also be considered a mid-range TV;
The Amlogic T982 is an upgrade of the T972. Compared with the previous generation, it can support dynamic MEMC compensation, as well as 120Hz refresh and HDMI 2.1 interface support, and can support VRR and ALLM technologies. Many mid-range TCL TVs are equipped with this model chip;
The Huawei HiSilicon V8111 is a mid-range chip launched with good overall performance. It adopts A73 dual-core+A53 dual-core cores, does not support VRR and ALLM, and cannot achieve 120Hz refresh, which is not good for gamers. So it can't be classified as a high-end chip;
Il MediaTek MT9652 is A73 quad-core architecture chip, supports HDMI2.1 48Gbps decoding, supports 120Hz refresh, supports hardware partition backlight, and can be faster to boot. The OPPO TV R series uses this chip;
The MediaTek MT9950 has better performance and computing power than the MT9652, and there is almost no lag when used for 4K 120Hz decoding. The maximum memory can support 8,5GB and the frequency reaches 1,8Ghz. It is currently the best chip for performance / price ratio and is used on Xiaomi TV Master 77OLED.
MediaTek Pentonic 2000 is a chip that has not yet debuted on the market. The SoC adopts an advanced 7nm manufacturing process and we will find it on many TVs launched in the coming months. It is reported that this chip will become standard for 8K TVs and has higher AI performance.
Finally, we have the Huawei HiSilicon V900 (SkyDome) with the highest performance among the chips currently on the market. The chip integrates 73-core 64-bit A8 cores, one G52 MC6 GPU and one NPU, supports 4K UI and large-scale game rendering, supports video decoding output up to 8K60P. Currently the Huawei Smart Screen V Pro and Z series are equipped with this chip.
