In addition to the new Amazon Fire series tablets, Amazon has also unveiled its new Fire TV box, which comes with 4K/UHD support, Alexa assistant and new Mediatek MT8173 SoC.

Amazon's new Fire TV will definitely be quite a competition for Apple TV as it is powered by Mediatek's flagship MT8173 SoC, a 64-bit quad-core chip with two Cortex-A72 cores clocked at 2.0GHz and two Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.6GHz as well as the PowerVR GX6250 GPU.

Bear in mind that Mediatek MT8173 is a 28nm chip and one of the first SoCs to pack the powerful Cortex-A72 core, so Amazon Fire TV should not draw much power, will not heat much and will pack quite a performance punch.

The rest of the specifications include 8GB of internal storage, 2GB of RAM, microSD card slot, dual-band, dual-antenna 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1, 10/100 Ethernet and a USB 2.0 port.

What makes the Fire TV better than Apple TV is the fact that it supports 4K/UHD 3840x2160 resolution at 30fps. Amazon has also announced that its original TV series as well as plenty of movies will be available in 4K by the time the new Fire TV becomes available.

Amazon also gave the new Fire TV its cloud-based assistant, known as Alexa, and ships the new box with Fire TV voice-enabled Remote Control.

Priced at US $99.99, the Amazon Fire TV is also cheaper than Apple TV and will be available on October 5th. Amazon also launched a different version of the Fire TV, called the Fire TV Gaming Edition which comes with Fire TV Game Controller and is priced at US $139.99.







Source: Amazon.com.