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posted by CoolHand on Thursday May 14 2015, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-one-lil-chip dept.

Samsung has unveiled three new systems-on-a-chip (SoC) at the Internet of Things World 2015 conference in San Francisco.

The Artik line consists of the Artik 1, Artik 5, and Artik 10. The Artik 1 is a dual-core chip with an area of 12 mm × 12 mm. Artik 5 is a more powerful dual-core chip with an area of 29 mm × 25 mm. The Artik 10 is an octo-core chip with an area of 39 mm × 29 mm. The Register reports:

Each of the three units comes with a different level of capabilities in order to meet the needs of a variety of applications. Final pricing wasn't discussed, but murmurings from the show floor suggest the modules will range from $10 on the low end to more than $100 for the top performer.

The tiniest of the three, the Artik 1, is just 12mm square, which Samsung says makes it the industry's smallest IoT module. Sammy is targeting wearable applications with this one and has pared down its specs accordingly. Inside, it packs an unspecified dual-core processor with one core running at 250MHz and the other clocked at 80MHz – so it's no speed demon but it knows how to sip power. Samsung says a smartwatch based on it could run for three weeks on a single charge. The unit includes 1MB of on-chip memory plus 4MB of flash storage, and it can output graphics at up to WVGA resolution (800-by-480). Rounding out the package are a Bluetooth Low Energy radio with an on-chip antenna and a nine-axis motion sensor with a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer.

If you want even more oomph for your devices, however, Samsung offers the Artik 10. This one comes in a package that's once again physically larger than the Artik 5, but it includes features that give it power comparable to a high-end smartphone. For CPU, it's got eight cores: four ARM A15s clocked at 1.3GHz apiece and four ARM A7s clocked at 1.0GHz each. For memory it has 2GB of LPDDR3+ RAM and 16GB of eMMC storage. Graphics are handled by an ARM Mali T628 MP6 GPU, which lets it push full 1080p HD video at 120fps. The Artik 10 has similar communications capabilities to the Artik 5, but more and better, including a USB 3.0 port in addition to the Artik 5's USB 2.0 port. It supports multi-channel hardware audio decoding, which makes this module well suited to multimedia applications.

Where OS is concerned, the Artik 1 is the oddball of the three Artik modules. It runs the Nucleus OS, a realtime operating system (RTOS) developed by Mentor Graphics that Samsung has used in its Touch phones in the past. The Artik 5 and Artik 10, meanwhile, are running Yocto 1.6, a customized embedded Linux distribution based on Fedora.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by gnuman on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:47PM

    by gnuman (5013) on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:47PM (#182989)

    You have to remember that Samsung has their own army of lawyers. They are not particularly afraid of someone suing them. In worse case, they'll just change the name.

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