Samsung’s Exynos W920 chip is a giant leap for Wear OS smartwatches

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 portable processor and the first processor upgrade for Samsung watches since the original Galaxy Watch. .

So why is the Exynos W920 so important? For starters, this will only be the third chipset capable of supporting the new Wear OS 3.0. It’s also a huge upgrade from Qualcomm’s 28nm Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset that currently powers most Wear OS smartwatches. So if you are using a Wear OS watch with the old Qualcomm chip, you should see a drastic improvement in performance.

The Exynos W920 also promises an upgrade over the Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus, which is based on the 12nm process and features Cortex A53 processor cores compared to its newer Cortex A55 cores.

Samsung claims you should get a 20% performance boost over its previous Exynos 9110 chipset which resides in the Galaxy Watch 3. Graphics performance is apparently ten times better with the Mali-G68 GPU.

Related: What is an SoC? chipsets explained

The Exynos W920 also houses a dedicated low-power Cortex M55 processor that will be solely responsible for managing the always-on display functionality of the Galaxy Watch 4. Samsung says this will help reduce the screen’s power requirements by compared to its previous Exynos model.

For connectivity, the Galaxy Watch 4’s Exynos W920 processor will come with a 4G LTE modem and a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to track speed, distance, and altitude during outdoor activities.

Overall, this is good news for fans of Wear OS watches. Performance has been one of their biggest complaints and the new Samsung processor combined with a new software experience should make the Galaxy Watch 4 a pretty powerful smartwatch.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 series finally breaks coverage on August 11. The portable line will debut alongside its foldable phone companions. You can click the button below to reserve Samsung’s next flagship.