Samsung has announced a new chip series for the Internet of Things. Called the Artik, the new platform is likely to help the company compete with the likes of Intel, Qualcomm and others in the IoT segment which is said to be the next big thing in the tech. Samsung's Artik has three versions – Artik 1, Artik 5 and Artik 10.
The chips are priced between $10 to less than $100. The smallest of the lot is the Artik 1, which measures 12mm-by-12mm combined with Bluetooth/BLE connectivity and a nine-axis sensor with focus on compute capabilities and power consumption. It is designed for low-power, small form-factor IoT applications. The ARTIK 5 is designed for home hubs, drones and high-end wearables. It incorporates a 1GHz dual-core processor and on-board DRAM and flash memory. The ARTIK 10 is focussed on high performance as it features an eight-core processor, full 1080p video decoding/encoding, 5.1 audio and 2GB DRAM along with 16GB flash memory. The Samsung ARTIK 10 includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth/BLE and ZigBee connectivity and is designed for use with home servers, media applications, and in industrial settings.
“We are providing the industry’s most advanced, open and secure platform for developing IoT products”, said Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer, Samsung Electronics. “By leveraging Samsung’s high-volume manufacturing, advanced silicon process and packaging technologies, and extensive ecosystem, ARTIK allows developers to rapidly turn great ideas into market leading IoT products and applications. Industry requirements for IoT devices vary in terms of battery life, computational horse power and form factor. With this family of ARTIK offerings, Samsung is directly addressing the needs of the widest range of customers, uses and applications.” Find out more details about the new Samsung Artik platform here.
The new platform clearly indicates at future focus of Samsung, which has already dominated the smartphone segment for quite some time. With increasing competition and saturation in several markets, Samsung is compelled to focus on wearables and IoTs. Last year, the company bought an IoT company called SmartThings for about $200 million. The company has been showcasing several smart and connected devices at events such as CES and others for quite a few years. While there's already competition from the likes of Intel and Qualcomm in the IoT segment, BlackBerry earlier this year introduced new platform for the Internet of Things (IoTs) at the CES 2015. The new platform is mainly aimed at the automotive and asset tracking industries.BlackBerry's new platform features technology from QNX Software Systems. BlackBerry claims the new platform is capable to deliver “highly responsive performance”. It also comes with an integrated analytics for data visualization and “fine-grained permissions that enable every action, message and data object to be validated”.