MediaTek has announced what seems to be the first processor for smartwatches – a chip that happens to be called MT2601. Designed to power smartwatches that run Android Wear, the new chip comes with two Cortex-A7 cores that run at 1.2 GHz and a Mali-400MP GPU that supports up to qHD resolution (960 x 540 pixels).
“The MT2601 has an incredibly small die size and is highly optimized for cost and power performance. The platform solution, comprised of MT2601 integrated with Android Wear software, will fuel the maker revolution and empower the application developer community worldwide to create a broad range of innovative applications and services,” said J.C. Hsu, General Manager of New Business Development at MediaTek.
MediaTek says the new MT2601 processor contains only 41.5 per cent of the components used in competing chips while providing more than enough performance at a lower cost and at very low power consumption. The new chip should be adopted in new smartwatch designs any time soon.
Until this moment all Android Wear-running smartwatches had a Snapdragon 400 processor inside, which is not designed to run in these devices. Moreover in order to achieve acceptable power consumption the Snapdragon 400 chip had some of its cores disabled. As you can see this was not the best scenario for smartwatches and smartwatch users alike.
Source: MediaTek