Qualcomm is rumoured to be working on a new wearable platform that would offer huge performance upgrades.
The rumour comes from Android Authority. It claims to have seen the CPU configuration and believes the platform is in testing phase.
Samsung has just announced a couple of new smartwatches in the form of the Galaxy Watch 8 and Watch 8 Classic, but despite the company's flagship phones running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon platforms, its smartwatches have Exynos chipsets inside.
That might be partly down to the fact that Qualcomm hasn't updated its wearable chip for nearly three years, with the W5 Gen 1 revealed in 2022. It means that Wear OS watches like the Pixel Watch 3 might have had other design and feature updates compared to predecessors, but the platform they run on is pretty old now.
But things might be about to change.
Android Authority has reported that it has found evidence Qualcomm is working on a new wearable chip and if it arrives, it's thought it could give Wear OS smartwatches a much-needed performance boost.
What could the new Qualcomm wearable chip offer?
According to the report, the new wearable chipset is said to be called the SW6100 with a codename of Aspen. It is claimed to be in the testing phase at Qualcomm and is also said to be based on a TSMC process node. Android Authority believes that TSMC's process nodes are further on than Samsung's and therefore the platform's efficiency should be improved.
The report also claims the new platform will support LPDDR5X RAM, which Android Authority claims should help with offering a small battery boost compared to Qualcomm's previous platform, which only supported LPDDR4.
The CPU configuration was also mentioned in the report, said to be 1x Arm Cortex-A78 + 4x Arm Cortex-A55, which would mean a huge performance upgrade compared to the previous configuration.
It's worth mentioning that the Eyxnos W1000 also uses the same configuration and as mentioned, this is the platform running the latest Samsung smartwatches.
It’s likely the new Qualcomm wearable chip, should it appear, will be called something different to the internal SW6100 name. Whether it will be W5 Gen 2, W6 Gen 1 or something different remains to be seen for now.
Qualcomm holds its Snapdragon Summit every year, however, so there’s a chance we will learn more about this upgraded wearable platform at that event. It's due to be held in September this year.
