Samsung launches Artik IoT platform for 'next-generation devices'

Artik 1, 5 and 10 chips take aim at wearables, the Internet of Things and smart offices

Samsung has unveiled a series of chips focused on the Internet of Things (IoT), marking the company's latest bid to take control of the growing wearables and smart hub markets.

The Artik 1, Artik 5 and Artik 10 chips were unveiled at the IoT World conference in San Francisco and are designed to power "the next generation of IoT devices", according to Samsung.

"We are providing the industry's most advanced, open and secure platform for developing IoT products," said Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer at Samsung Electronics.

"By leveraging Samsung's high-volume manufacturing, advanced silicon process, packaging technologies and extensive ecosystem, Artik allows developers to rapidly turn great ideas into market-leading IoT products and applications."

The smallest of the chips, the Artik 1, is designed for wearable devices, such as smartwatches, and is a minuscule 12x12mm.

The Artik 1 features a dual-core application processor based on the MIPS 32 architecture with 1MB of on-chip memory, 4MB of flash storage, a nine-axis motion sensor with gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer, and Bluetooth low energy connectivity.

The 29mm x 25mm Artik 5 features slightly more impressive specifications, including a 1GHz dual-core ARM-based processor, ARM Mali-400 MP2 GPU, 512MB of LPDDR3 RAM and 4GB of eMMC storage.

The Artik 5 is also features 802.11b,g,n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Bluetooth LE, ZigBee networking, USB, MMC flash card and I/O port support.

At the top end, the 29x39mm Artik 10 is the largest and most powerful of the new chips, and comes with an octa-core processor built from 1.3GHz and 1GHz ARM cores, and an ARM Mali-T628 MP6 GPU with full 1080p HD video support.

The Artik 10 also has the most memory of the three, with 2GB of LPDDR3+ RAM and 16GB of eMMC storage, and is the best equipped when it comes to connectivity with USB 3.0 support.

Samsung listed security as a major selling point for the Artik platform, pointing out that all three chips contain a "Secure Element" feature.

"Artik's best-in-class security solution includes Secure Element and machine learning for anomaly detection, and Trusted Execution Environment," read the Artik platform product description.

IoT security is a growing concern in the technology industry. Maarten Ectors, Canonical's vice president of next-generation networks, listed security as a key issue hampering IoT adoption.

He warned during an interview with V3 at MWC that bugs on a par with Heartbleed will inevitably be found in next-generation devices and platforms.