ARM planning the Mali-470 GPU for smartwatches and wearables

One of the next big markets for tech companies is the wearable space, which you probably already knew. If you’ve had a smartwatch in the past few years, you also probably know how battery life typically isn’t great and the actual graphics processing is, well, not so great, either. Kind of like our smartphones several years ago.

Fortunately for all of us, ARM is planning on tackling the problem with a new GPU designed specifically for smartwatches and wearables. The reported Mali-470 GPU will be a major step up from what’s currently in use and supports OpenGL ES 2.0 for better graphical effects. The most important thing to focus on, however, is battery life.

Battery life on smartwatches right now isn’t great, unless you want an extra device to charge every night, which not many of us do. The Mali-470 is designed to sip power instead of drain it like current hardware, which should drastically extend battery life on your futuristic wrist-computers. That’s good news for everyone.

ARM isn’t expecting any of these GPUs to hit market until 2016, and it’ll take awhile for manufacturers to design things to take advantage of the lower power consumption, but things are looking bright for the future of smartwatches.

source: ARM

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