Wear OS is facing a recurring problem: the lack of a capable chipset that can balance performance and battery life, but that may soon change when Qualcomm announces its new Snapdragon Wear processor. Most manufacturers that launch Wear OS smartwatches use chipsets from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear line. The Snapdragon Wear 4100 and Snapdragon Wear 4100+, which power the new generation Wear OS smartwatches, were announced in 2020 and are now due for successors.
In 2021 when Samsung announced the Galaxy Watch 4 series, the new smartwatches not only debuted a new version of Wear OS co-developed with Google they also came along with a brand new chipset, the Exynos W920. Built on a 5nm node, this processor offered significant upgrades over Qualcomm’s chipsets.
There have been rumors that Qualcomm’s next-gen wearable chipsets will launch as the Snapdragon Wear 5100. A report from Winfuture confirms the name and reveals a handful of important information. Like its current offerings, it has been reported that Qualcomm will announce two versions of the chip — the Snapdragon Wear 5100 and the Snapdragon Wear 5100+. While both processors will be built on a 4nm node like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, a significant jump from the 12nm process of the Snapdragon Wear 4100 series, there will be some significant differences.
Performance & Power Management Gets A Huge Boost
The Snapdragon 5100 will have its power management IC (PMIC) separated from the system-on-a-chip (SoC), while the Snapdragon Wear 5100 Plus will have the chip and PMIC in a single package. Both processors will have four Cortex-A53 cores, the same as the Snapdragon 4100 series, clocked at 1.7GHz and an Adreno 702 GPU clocked at 700MHz. Although the CPU cores are not as powerful as the Cortex-A55 cores of the Exynos W920, the smaller node size should give them an edge. The two chips can support up to 4GB LPDDR4X RAM and eMMC 5.1 storage. Qualcomm is reportedly testing 2GB and 4GB variants of the chip, which means we may see the end of 1GB RAM on Wear OS smartwatches.
The plus variant will also have a low-power co-processor similar to the Snapdragon Wear 4100+. However, this new co-processor is from the QCC5100 series, which Qualcomm designed for earbuds and speakers. The 22nm Arm Cortex-M55 chip, which has its win GPU, will be able to handle low-power tasks that would instead be assigned to the main CPU. It has also been reported that the chip has a Machine Learning core that can be used for features such as fall detection and heart rate measurement. Also, unlike the Snapdragon Wear 5100, which will have a separate Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip, the Snapdragon Wear 5100+ will have its Bluetooth and Wi-Fi module in the co-processor.
The Snapdragon Wear 5100 series looks promising and is a worthy challenger to the Exynos W920. Not only will the smaller node size bring improvements in performance and power efficiency to Wear OS watches, the larger RAM means more apps can stay in memory. Also, the co-processor of the plus variant will ensure better power management as it can handle tasks that the main chip would otherwise control. Information regarding the processors’ launch is currently unknown, but they are expected to be announced this year.
