Qualcomm returns to the smartwatch market with a 4nm “W5+ Gen1” SoC

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Qualcomm's long-awaited update to its SoC line of smartwatches is official. These chips have usually been called "Snapdragon Wear", but it seems that this brand is dead, so it's time to meet the "Qualcomm Snapdragon W5+ Gen1" and "Snapdragon W5 Gen1". Qualcomm promises the chips offer the "company's most advanced leap yet," which isn't saying much for a company that previously jumped six years between major smartwatch chip releases.

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The W5+ seems to be a major update though. Compared to 2020's Wear 4100, Qualcomm promises "2X performance across CPU, GPU, camera, memory, and video/audio", "50% longer battery life" offering "days of use" and a "30% smaller" chip for sleeker designs.

Unlike the Wear 4100 at the time of its release, the W5 is built on a state-of-the-art 4nm manufacturing process. Qualcomm equipped the chip with four ARM Cortex A53 processors running at up to 1.7 GHz and an Adreno A702 GPU. The "plus" version includes a second 22nm SOC based on the Cortex M55 for non-screen background processes, like updating the watch face, monitoring notifications and tracking fitness stats . Qualcomm is promising low-power islands for Wi-Fi, GPS, and audio so these features can be used without powering up the entire chip. The SoC supports an LTE modem, Wi-Fi 802.11n (aka Wi-Fi 4), and Bluetooth 5.3

Enlarge / Only the "plus" version gets this co-processor. Qualcomm

It's unclear where the W5+ will fall in the hierarchy of Android smartwatch chips. Its competitor, the Samsung Exynos W920, has two A55 cores built on a 5nm process. Qualcomm has the process node advantage, but Samsung uses newer cores and Qualcomm uses four cores compared to Samsung's two. We need someone to run Geekbench on both watches, but it looks like the two chips will split single-threaded and multi-threaded wins. If nothing else, the Qualcomm chip is competitive, hopefully marking a new era of the company taking the smartwatch market more seriously.

Qualcomm says it already has round and square watch reference designs from Compal and Pegatron ODMs ready for partners to use. This will come in handy for the majority of Wear OS makers, which are mostly just fashion brands that need lots of third-party help. If you don't make your own chips or have Google's seemingly exclusive deal with Samsung, Qualcomm is the only game in town for smartwatch chips, so the company says partners already have 25 designs in hand. Classes. Oppo and Mobvoi (the makers of TicWatch) are the first to come out and are expected to have new watches with the chips this fall.

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