Samsung's new Galaxy Watch 4 chipset is a giant leap for Wear OS smartwatches

Samsung has announced the new Exynos W920 chipset that’ll power its upcoming Galaxy Watch 4 smartwatches. The SoC is the industry’s first 5nm-based wearables processor and the first processor upgrade for Samsung watches since the original Galaxy Watch.

So why is the Exynos W920 a big deal? For starters, it’ll only be the third chipset capable of supporting the new Wear OS 3.0. It’s also a huge upgrade compared to Qualcomm’s 28nm Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset that powers most Wear OS smartwatches right now. So if you’re someone who’s been using a Wear OS watch with the older Qualcomm chip, you should experience a drastic boost in performance.

The Exynos W920 also promises an upgrade over the Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus that’s based on the 12nm process and features Cortex A53 CPU cores compared to its newer Cortex A55 cores.

Samsung claims you should get a 20% performance boost compared to its previous Exynos 9110 chipset that resides in the Galaxy Watch 3. The 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’ll be solely responsible for handling the Always-On Display functionality of the Galaxy Watch 4. Samsung says it’ll help reduce the power requirements of the display 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) for tracking speed, distance, and elevation during outdoor activities.

All in all, it’s good news for fans of Wear OS watches. Performance has been one of their biggest complaints and the new Samsung processor combined with a fresh software experience should make the Galaxy Watch 4 a pretty powerful smartwatch.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 series finally breaks cover on August 11. The wearable line will debut alongside its foldable phone companions. You can hit the button below to reserve the next Samsung flagship.