Qualcomm Teases Next-Gen Snapdragon Wearable

Qualcomm has already made its mark in the smartphone and gaming industry, and the only thing left is to conquer the smartwatch market. However, its chipsets had lackluster performance in the past regarding smartwatches, but it looks like all that is changing.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Twitter account released a teaser, which suggests that the company is coming out with a modern and improved chipset for smartwatches.

Qualcomm smartwatch processor

Sometime back, rumors hit the internet about Qualcomm’s two new wearable chipsets. The Snapdragon Wear 5100 and 5100+, maybe manufactured through Samsung Foundry’s 4nm process. If that is the case, users could get efficient performance and longer battery life than the present smartwatches. However, the tweet is just a teaser video with no specs at all.

The Snapdragon Wear 5100 allegedly uses an MLP (molded laser package) that separates the power management from the SoC. Meanwhile, the Wear 5100+ will use an MEP (molded embedded package), under which the PMIC and SoC will be incorporated in the same package.

Both chips will come with four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, along with an Adreno 702 GPU working at 700MHz. They will support LPPDR4X RAM, an integrated ISP that can run two camera sensors and 1080p recording, and eMMC 5.1 storage. The chipsets will support both Google and Android’s Wear OS.

When talking about the plus model, it could have a QCC5100 co-processor based on ARM’s Cortex-M55. The co-processor will be able to handle Bluetooth connection and data on its own, with the 5100+ kicking in only for more demanding tasks.

We could see improvements in the up-and-coming Wear OS smartwatches due to Qualcomm’s chipset and the Exynos W920. On the other hand, Google’s collaboration with Samsung for Wear OS 3 has led to better integration between Chromebooks, Android phones, and tablets. However, there is still some wait ahead of us until we officially see the chipsets in action.