Wear OS gets multigenerational power leap thanks to Samsung

Tomorrow is Samsung’s big event for the second half of 2021, and in addition to releasing foldable smartphones, the company is set to unveil the Galaxy Watch 4 and the big Wear OS overhaul it is working on with Google. Google is preparing the first major version of Wear OS since 2018, and Samsung is dropping Tizen for smartwatches and launching Wear OS with the Galaxy Watch 4. Last night, Samsung unveiled the main SoC for the Galaxy Watch 4, and compared what Wear OS usually gets, Samsung delivers a beast of an SoC.

The “Samsung Exynos W920” will be a multigenerational performance leap for Wear OS. Samsung says it’s a 5nm chip with dual ARM Cortex A55 cores and an ARM Mali-G68 GPU. For always-on display mode, there is an additional Cortex M55 processor, which can spin the watch face while using minimal power. There’s also a built-in LTE modem for on-the-go connectivity.

Compared to Samsung’s previous smartwatch chip, the Tizen-only Exynos 9110 (10nm, 2x Cortex A53), the company promises “around 20%” better processor performance and “ten times better graphics performance”. Remember that the Exynos 9110 is 2018, so those comparative numbers are inflated, but at 5nm it’s a more modern chip that Wear OS has never seen.

Wear OS has suffered for years at the hands of Qualcomm, which has starved the ecosystem of quality SoCs for wearable devices. Most people’s latest experience with Wear OS is with the Snapdragon Wear 2100 or 3100 SoCs, both of which were older Cortex A7 processors built on a 28nm process. Qualcomm introduced a slightly more modern chip, the Wear 4100 in 2020 (a 12nm chip based on the Cortex A53), but hardly any manufacturer actually shipped that chip a year later, and we’re still getting launches from Wear. 3100 today. Qualcomm’s response to Samsung’s chip will be the Wear 5100, which is not due until 2022.

So now we know Samsung’s chip looks great on paper. Wear OS is reintegrating a true hardware company instead of the hordes of fashion brands it previously survived on, and the Galaxy Watch 4 is shaping up to be quality hardware. But what is Google doing with the software? The company has hardly said anything about Wear OS 3.0. We hope to hear a lot more about the operating system tomorrow. Expecting to learn more about Google’s operating system at a Samsung event seems a bit questionable, but that’s apparently how this collaboration works now.