Canonical Brings Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to MediaTek's Genio 520, 720

Canonical has announced an extension of its partnership with MediaTek that will bring its Ubuntu Linux distribution to even more embedded devices and projects, by adding support for the Genio 520 and 720 system-on-chips (SoCs).

"The addition of the new Genio 520 and 720 platforms underscores Canonical's continued collaboration with MediaTek to expand choice and innovation at the edge," says Canonical's Cindy Goldberg of the latest fruit from the companies' collaboration. "By combining MediaTek’s advanced AI [Artificial Intelligence]‑edge silicon with Ubuntu’s enterprise‑grade manageability and lifecycle support, enterprises can confidently deploy and scale IoT [Internet of Things] solutions globally."

"By bringing Ubuntu support to the MediaTek Genio 520 and 720 platforms, developers will now have access to a mature, open, and developer-friendly ecosystem," adds MediaTek's CK Wang. "Ubuntu's long‑term maintenance and edge‑optimized capabilities make it an ideal platform for building next‑generation industrial, robotics, and smart‑device solutions."

The compatibility pledge covers MediaTeK's Genio 520 and 720, announced back in March last year as powered-up successor to the Genio 500 and 700 respectively. Both include two Arm Cortex-A78 and six Cortex-A55 processor cores running at up to 2.6GHz depending on speed and temperature rating, an Arm Mali-G57 MC2 graphics processor, and coprocessors for on-device video, digital signal processing, and machine learning model acceleration — the latter delivering up to a claimed 10 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at minimum precision.

Under the partnership, Canonical has released Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support (LTS) images "specifically optimized for MedaTek Genio platforms" — though the company warns they are to be considered "an early access release […] for engineering preview and demo purposes," with a beta-status build to follow.

The images are available to download now on Ubuntu.com, in both desktop and server variants; an Ubuntu Core 24 build has been promised, but had not yet been released at the time of writing.