Samsung’s Exynos W920 chip is a giant leap for Wear OS smartwatches
TL; DR
- Samsung has announced the Exynos W920 chipset, which will power the upcoming Galaxy Watch 4 series.
- It’s the industry’s first 5nm wearables processor and a huge upgrade for the Wear OS ecosystem.
Samsung has announced the new Exynos W920 chipset that will power its upcoming Galaxy Watch 4 smartwatches. The SoC is the industry’s first 5nm-based wearables processor and the first processor upgrade for Samsung watches since the original Galaxy Watch.
Why is the Exynos W920 a big deal? For starters, it will only be the third chipset that can support the new Wear OS 3.0. It’s also a huge upgrade compared to Qualcomm’s 28nm Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset, which currently powers most Wear OS smartwatches. So if you’re using a Wear OS watch with the older Qualcomm chip, you should see a drastic boost in performance.
The Exynos W920 also promises an upgrade over the Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus, which is based on the 12 nm process and has Cortex A53 CPU cores compared to its newer Cortex A55 cores.
Samsung claims that you should see a 20% increase in performance compared to the previous Exynos 9110 chipset housed in the Galaxy Watch 3. The graphics performance is apparently ten times better with the Mali-G68 GPU.
Related: What is a SoC? Chipsets explained
The Exynos W920 also includes a dedicated, low-power Cortex M55 processor that is solely responsible for handling the Galaxy Watch 4‘s always-on display functionality. Samsung says it will help reduce the display’s power consumption compared to its predecessor, the Exynos model.
For connectivity, the Galaxy Watch 4’s Exynos W920 processor comes with a 4G LTE modem and a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) for tracking speed, distance and altitude during outdoor activities.
All in all, good news for fans of Wear OS watches. Performance was one of their biggest complaints, and the new Samsung processor combined with a fresh software experience should make the Galaxy Watch 4 a pretty powerful smartwatch.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 series finally breaks out of cover on August 11th. The wearable line will debut along with their foldable phone companions. You can click the button below to reserve the next Samsung flagship.
