A day before the official unveiling of its new hardware lineup, South Korean tech giant Samsung has announced the processor that will power its upcoming smartwatch series — Galaxy Watch 4. The chipset — called Samsung Exynos W920 — supports the new unified wearable platform that has been co-developed by Samsung and Google.
The Samsung Exynos W920 processor is a successor to the Exynos 9110 that the South Korean giant unveiled about three years ago along with the Galaxy Watch, and this new chip will power the Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic smartwatches.
The Exynos W920 packs two Arm Cortex-A55 cores for high-performing yet power-efficient processing and an Arm Mali-G68 GPU that boasts improved CPU performance around 20-percent and ten times better graphics performance than its predecessor. With upgraded cores and improved performance, the Exynos W920 enables faster application launches and more interactive eye-catching 3D graphical user interface (GUI) on a device’s qHD (960×540) display. The Korean firm touts up to a 20% CPU improvement over the Exynos W9110 with a huge 10x graphical performance leap.
With a dedicated Cortex-M55 co-processor, the Exynos W920 can utilize this to reduce power draw when using features such as an Always-on display. There’s also an embedded 4G LTE Cat. 4 modems for wireless communication and GNSS L1 for positional tracking. Another notable upgrade is support for screen resolutions up to 960 x 540 pixels, which give more room for form factor experimentation.
It also comes integrated with GNSS (Global Satellite Navigation System), 4G (LTE) modem, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, and the new processor supports Wear OS jointly developed by Google and Samsung.
At its Galaxy Unpacked 2021 event, Samsung is expected to launch two models in the Galaxy Watch 4 lineup — Galaxy Watch 4 Classic and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4.