Qualcomm has announced the new generation of processors for smartwatches, and as expected also an adaptation of the name paradigm to the rest of the company’s processors. The new generation consists of two processors, the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and also the W5 + version that offers a bit more performance.
According to Qualcomm, the new processors offer up to 50% less power compared to the previous generation, the Snapdragon Wear 4100, in the plus version, and yet offer improved performance at the level of up to X2. In addition, there was a significant change in the lithography of the new processors with a transition from production at 12 and 28 nm to production at 4 and 22 nm, so that the area of the new processor is 30% smaller than that of its predecessor. Yes claims that it offers up to twice as many features.
The new processor supports the new Bluetooth 5.3 wireless standard, also has an integrated speaker, and now supports LPDDR4 memory at 2,133 MHz compared to LPDDR3 at 750 Hz in the previous generation. The main processor consists as in the previous generation of 4 Cortex-A53 cores, but the supporting processors, for machine learning and graphics, have undergone a significant change according to the company.
The company says that several manufacturers are already working on watches based on the Snapdragon W5 platform, and the first company is supposed to be Oppo with the Watch 3 series that it is developing together with Qualcomm. An updated version of TicWatch, Mobvoi’s new flagship watch, is also expected to hit the market this fall.