Samsung Exynos W920 officially confirmed coming to the Galaxy Watch 4

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Although it is hardly like OnePlus or even the old LG, Samsung once in a while does its own teasing of upcoming products without actually teasing them. It does so by announcing beforehand some of the technologies and features that will be seen in the next product launch. With less than 36 hours left before Unpacked 2021, Samsung is doing exactly that with the Galaxy Watch 4, revealing the brains behind what could be the most interesting Wear OS smartwatch to launch in a long while.

It was already leaked that Samsung would be using a new Exynos W920 chipset for the Galaxy Watch 4, but now it's official. In terms of raw specs, Samsung bills it as the industry's first processor with an integrated LTE modem built using a 5nm EUV process node. It crams two Cortex-A55 CPU cores, power management, LPDDR4 RAM, and eMMC storage in the same compact package that will allow smartwatch makers to allocate more space for batteries.

More than just the specs, however, the capabilities that the new Exynos W920 brings to smartwatches are even more important. The performance upgrade and Mali-G68 GPU, for example, empowers smartwatches to use more sophisticated GUIs and supports a resolution of up to 960x540, a lot higher than the rumored 450x450 screen of the Galaxy Watch 4. There's also the embedded 4G LTE Cat. 4 modem for wireless communication and GNSS L1 for positional tracking.

Another key component of the new chipset is the low-power Cortex-M55 that acts as a display processor. This enables features like Always-on Display or AOD that can show the time and notifications without waking up the whole smartwatch. Together with more space for a bigger battery, the processor promises longer battery life in general.

The Samsung Exynos W920 supports the "new unified wearable platform Samsung built jointly with Google." This, of course, means it will be the chip that powers the next Galaxy Watch series that's coming on August 11. It will definitely be interesting to see how it will hold up against the current Snapdragon Wear 4100, though its exclusivity to Samsung's smartwatches doesn't exactly make it a competitor.