MediaTek has been gaining ground inside of the chip market this past year, offering up some great solutions for device manufacturers looking for comparable mobile processors but at a more affordable cost. This year MediaTek has announced that they’re partnering with Google on their new Google Cast for Audio offering where we will see MediaTek’s processors(the MT8507 SOC)powering a series of Google Cast ready speakers and soundbars, for easy connection to the consumers devices to let them cast audio from some of today’s top music streaming apps. MediaTek is showing off their stuff at this year’s CES trade show to demonstrate the future Google Cast offering.
The Google Cast ready speakers and soundbars will be compatible with popular streaming apps like Google Play Music, YouTube, Pandora, Rhapsody, iHeart Radio, TuneIn, Rdio and NPROne and many more. Basically anything that allows for a connection and casting option to Chromecast now should have support for the Google Cast for audio devices. While Bluetooth wireless speakers are great, this new set of Google Cast ready speaker systems will allow a quick and easy listening experience without having to connect up to Bluetooth since the Google cast technology works through being connected to the same local WiFi network as the device that’s trying to cast.
Since Google Cast for audio is new, MediaTek’s MT8507 SoC will be the first connected chip on the market developed to work with Google Cast for audio. More will come in time of course, but this means major business for MediaTek as Google is a huge partner to have and one that will likely put them a little more in the spotlight. The MT8507 features an ARM Cortex A7 CPU core with L2 cache and floating point unit, High-Res audio format support 192 KHz for PCM, FLAC, DSD, and APE, and Dolby TrueHD and DTS Digital Surround decode capability. It’s also got support for 16-bit single-channel DDR3 RAM up to 512 MB, USB 2.0, SD Card, and MHL as well as support for 10/100 Ethernet-MAC/PHY with built-in WoLAN capability. Since this isn’t really an announcement of the Google Cast for audio speakers themselves, we don’t have any word on prices just yet, but it’s exciting to see Google take their Google Cast technology in a new direction.