Qualcomm announces new 4nm Snapdragon chips for smartwatches

American chip maker Qualcomm on Tuesday announced its new lineup of 4nm Snapdragon chips for smartwatches and wearable devices.

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon W5 Plus Gen 1 and W5 Gen 1 chipsets will succeed the Snapdragon Wear 4100 and 4100+ platforms that powers the current generation of Wear OS devices. The company claims that the new chips will deliver twice the performance and 50 percent longer battery life while drawing less than half the power as compared to the older chipset.

“Purpose-built for next generation wearables, these platforms address the most pressing consumer needs by delivering ultra-low power, breakthrough performance, and highly integrated packaging,” said Pankaj Kedia, global head of Smart Wearables, senior director, product marketing, Qualcomm.

The new chipsets are based on the 4nm architecture and the W5 Plus Gen 1, in particular, also packs a 22nm-based always-on co-processor. The inclusion of the co-processor enables features like low-power Bluetooth 5.3, Wi-Fi, GNSS, and adds support for new power states like Deep Sleep and Hibernate.

The new Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Plus Gen 1 SoC packs four Arm Cortex-A53 cores and one Cortex M55 core for machine-learning and artificial intelligence tasks. The new chipset also features an Adreno 702 GPU clocked at 1GHz for graphics which is a significant improvement over the 320MHz Adreno 504 GPU found on the Snapdragon Wear 4100+.

On the design front, the company says that its new Snapdragon W5 Plus Gen 1 and W5 Gen 1 chipsets will enable OEMs to design wearable devices that are 30 percent smaller and sleeker than the current generation.

The new Snapdragon W5 Plus Gen 1 and W5 Gen 1 chipsets will debut on the Oppo Watch 3 series next month, followed by Mobvoi’s next-gen smartwatch TicWatch.

“We are thrilled to be working with a range of customers and partners, thus expanding our thriving wearable ecosystem, and are delighted to announce 25 designs in the pipeline across segments based on the new platforms. We have collaborated extensively with our first customers, Oppo and Mobvoi, over the last year and look forward to seeing their products,” said Kedia.