4K Output on New AppleTV?

[jnpy!$4g3cwk]

4K can and will most likely be just a simple software update away.

It could be, although I'm not sure you can do an HEVC decoder in software for UHD that easily. Based on this report, even a recent 4C4T Bay Trail chip is about 1/3 of what you need for 3840x2160p60. I don't think you want an 8 Core Haswell Xeon E5 in a set top box. The A8 would probably need some kind of acceleration assist in the GPU.

^^ What he or she said. ^^ HDMI 1.4 (along with the rest of the new ATV's hardware) IS capable of 4k. The rest is only a firmware/software update away... Once that Apple finds it worthwhile, based on demand and content supply.

There is a little more to it than just painting a 4K screen. You also need to decode the HEVC or VP9 stream.

Also as far as we know in the iPhone 6 there is a chip (presumably on the A8 or graphics card?) which does encode/decode HEVC for Facetime. We don't know yet if this is hidden in the ATV4.

Here is a single chip solution, but, I'm guessing that they wouldn't have put in an extra chip in this case. Anybody know if the class of GPU they use can do HEVC acceleration?