Don’t expect the Google TV Streamer to be a true Apple TV 4K competitor – its chip isn’t really up to the task
The new Google TV Streamer is a lot more powerful than the Chromecast with Google TV – but it reportedly shares the same chipset as the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max. That confirms what we suspected: it’s a powerful enough streaming device, but in terms of raw horsepower, the Apple TV 4K (2022) leaves it far behind.
The chipset has been unveiled at Android Authoritywhich reports that the chipset inside Google’s new device is the MediaTek MT8696. That’s pretty old in chip terms: Amazon used it in the 2021 version of its Fire TV Stick 4K Max, though Google’s streamer has twice as much RAM as that device.
There are some interesting differences between the Amazon Fire TV Stick and Google’s much newer product, and not all of them are for good. Android Authority reports that where the first-gen Amazon device had Wi-Fi 6, Google only offers Wi-Fi 5. And the Amazon device was half the price of the Google one.
The Google TV Streamer is not an Apple TV killer
As we noted in our Google TV Streamer vs Apple TV 4K comparison, the Apple TV 4K is a much more powerful device: it has the A15 Bionic chip, the same chip that powered the iPhone 13 Pro Max and iPhone 14. It’s a six-core CPU with two high-performance cores and two power-efficient cores, with the former clocked at up to 3.23GHz; it also has a dedicated 16-core Neural Engine and a five-core GPU. For comparison, the MediaTek chip is a quad-core clocked at up to 2.0GHz, and the GPU is believed to be Imagine Technologies’ four-core PowerVR GE9215.
Does it matter? For smart home control and smart TV viewing, no: the MediaTek chip is perfectly capable of doing everything you could want in home entertainment, from decoding high-quality video to delivering a buttery-smooth user experience. By comparison, the Apple TV 4K hardware is overkill. But maybe that’s the point.
There are things the Apple TV 4K can do that the Google TV Streamer can’t. When tvOS 18 launches next month (or in October; tvOS updates sometimes lag behind iOS), it will bring machine learning-powered dialogue enhancement to movies and vocal clarity enhancement to music; live captioning and Continuity Camera improvements for FaceTime calls; an improved Apple Fitness+ experience; and Spatial Audio streaming via AirPlay. Both the Google TV Streamer and Apple TV 4K are in disguise: the former is actually a streaming stick, and the latter is a smartphone.
And that’s just the current model.
Rumors of a newer, more powerful Apple TV have been circulating for a few years now, and while the experience has me tempering my enthusiasm somewhat, it’s possible that the next Apple TV will be part of Apple’s concerted gaming push. While the gaming focus of the current Apple TV is on Apple’s own Arcade and its fun but hardly hardware-intensive titles, the next one could be a powerful gaming console in its own right.
That will require some changes to tvOS – it currently has some pretty strict limits on how much space apps can take up, for example – but it could finally deliver the Apple gaming experience that some of us have been craving since the days of the Apple Pippin.
The Google TV Streamer looks great for TV and smart home, but the Apple TV 4K is designed to do basically everything. Whether that’s what you want, want to is a different story, but based on the chip, don’t expect Google to unveil new, advanced apps that weren’t possible on the Chromecast with Google TV.