In the smartphone department, Samsung oscillates between its own chips and those from Qualcomm to power its devices, but when it comes to smartwatches, the South Korean manufacturer has always relied on its own Exynos chips for power.
With new smartwatches incoming in a few days, Samsung has announced the chipset that will be running them: its own Exynos W1000. “1000” is a milestone of a number, and quite fittingly, this happens to be the company's first-ever 3nm chip. Our expectations for the W1000 are set very high.
The Samsung Exynos W1000 Is The First 3nm Chip Mass-Produced By Samsung's Foundries
Last year, Samsung's smartwatches launched with the Exynos W930 inside. This was a 5nm chip in that one and it was merely a dual-core processor with two Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.4GHz. It seemed to do the job well enough, but now, as Samsung has moved to the next generation of its smartwatch chips, the target it's aiming for seems to be much higher.
The Exynos W1000 moves to a 3nm process, making it the first 3nm chip Samsung has ever released — yes, before any smartphones even. It takes a leap from its dual-core predecessor to being a penta-core chip. It now has four Cortex-A55 cores instead of two, and each is clocked higher, at 1.5GHz, so that's an instant win when it comes to performance. Yet, that's without even mentioning the single Cortex-A78 core with a 1.6GHz clock speed. Samsung isn't messing about this time and they say this watch will open apps 2.7x faster. I believe it.
You get the same Mali-G68 MP2 GPU as the W930, with support for up to 640 x 640 circular displays. On the connectivity front, things remain the same. You still get LTE, GPS, GLONASS, and more. The storage support pushes up to 32GB and the new smartwatches from Samsung are both expected to have 32GB of storage, which is twice as much as the old chip could handle.
Samsung says its 2.5D always-on-display engine should mean richer details and improved watch faces. Finally, the 3nm process means that the Exynos W1000 should be more power-efficient than last year's 5nm chip, which should mean better battery life.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 And Watch 7 Ultra Are Certainly Being Powered By The W1000
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 and the Galaxy Watch Ultra are the two smartwatches pending from Samsung in 2024 (since the Galaxy Watch FE has already launched). Both of these smartwatches are expected to come with the new Exynos W1000, which was rumored even before today's announcement, so with this timing, it is essentially certain that the new watches will have the W1000 inside.
This should be a major boost over the Watch 6 series since the upgraded core structure and smaller process make this SoC very obviously superior to the W930. We should also expect improved battery endurance, which might be why Samsung seemingly decided to stick with the same battery size in the Watch 7 models as in the Watch 6 ones.
The Samsung Galaxy Ring will need a processor too, but without a display, I reckon Samsung might be able to get away with an older chip. However, it might value the W1000 in its first smart ring since it is physically smaller than the W930, for example.
