On top of all of their other enterprises, Samsung is also a major ARM chip designer and manufacturer, their Exynos chips power many of their devices and can even be found in some other OEMs devices. This week they announced their latest chip focused on the emerging wearable market, the Exynos 7 Dual 7270, a dual-core 1.0GHz processor.
What’s so special about it? To start with the processor is the first wearable-specific chip to be manufactured using a 14nm process. This should extend battery life while maintaining, or even increasing, compute power. For wearables, this is even more important than for mobiles, where it is possible to make the device a few mm thicker and gain significant battery gains.
The chip also includes a category 4 LTE modem, eliminating the need for a separate LTE chip which would also bring further power and system efficiency. In addition, the chip also supports, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou as well as various other elements needed to make a smart device work.
Time will tell if the Exynos 7 Dual can unseat Qualcomm’s offerings as the main processor in wearables going forward. The Snapdragon Wear 2100 would be the closest competitor which is built on a 28nm process but is similar in most other aspects.
Good on Samsung. Interesting that current wearables nearly all run Snapdragon and are a pretty uninspiring bunch. That segment needs a shot in the arm and someone like Samsung to shake it up.