Back at CES 2015, Samsung announced that by 2017 the company expects to see all of its products to be connected and ready for the age of the Internet of Things (IoT). The South Korean company made a huge step towards that goal earlier today with the announcement of the Artik platform, a series of three tiny system-on-chips that will power the next generation of smart devices.
Built for a variety of devices, the Artik lineup currently has three SoCs: Artik 1, Artik 5 and Artik 10, all varying in size and hardware. The smallest-sized Artik 1 measures just 12mm x 12mm, packing an accelerometer, Bluetooth LE, gyro, magnetometer and is powered by a coin-cell battery that runs for up to several weeks. It runs on a dual-core CPU running at 250MHz and 80MHz, with 1MB of RAM and 4MB of flash storage. The ultra small form factor is the smallest in its class, and is designed for wearables and IoT end nodes. The cost? Less than $10 (about RM36).
Samsung Artik 1
Samsung Artik 5
The larger Artik 5 is significantly more capable piece of kit. This 29 x 25mm board houses a 1GHz ARM A7-based dual-core CPU with a Mali 400 SP2 GPU, 512MB LPDDR3 RAM and 4GB of eMMC storage. Its suite of connectivity options include WiFi, Bluetooth, Bluetooth LE + ZigBee, while its hardware supports H.263/H264/MPEG-4/VP8 (720p) @30fps and decoding of MPEG-2/VC1/Xvid (720p)@30fps. On top of that, Samsung’s new ePoP (embedded Package-on-Package) packaging technology offer the best combination of computing power and storage capacity at its size.
Finally, the most powerful Artik SoC is the Artik 10. Powerful enough to be used in smartphones, the Artik 10 is only slightly larger than the Artik 5 at 29 x 39mm, but packs quite an impressive amount of hardware. There’s an ARM-based octa-core CPU (4x A15 @ 1.3GHz and 4x A7 @ 1GHz) and a Mali T628 MP6 GPU, 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM and 16GB of eMMC storage. With connectivity options including WiFi, Bluetooth LE, ZigBee and even USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 hosts, the Artik 10 is basically a tiny PC that retails for $100.
Samsung Artik 10
The Artik platform is available with an Alpha Development Kit starting from today, and Samsung is making sure the platform is completely open for all. The Artik software supports many development environments, including Arduino IDE, C++, Java, Groovy and Samsung’s own SDK.
For more information, interested developers can check out www.artik.io, and apply for the Alpha Development Kit there.
(Source: Samsung Artik via The Verge)
