Qualcomm Snapdragon W5+ Gen1 enters the flagship smartwatch market

Qualcomm has officially unveiled the long-awaited update to its line of smartwatch SoCs. These chips were commonly referred to as “Snapdragon Wear”but it looks like that brand is dead so it’s time to get to know the “Qualcomm Snapdragon W5+ Gen1″and “Snapdragon W5 Gen1”. Qualcomm is promising that the chips will provide the company’s “most advanced leap”, which says little for a company that has previously been making mainstream smartwatch chips for six years.

However, W5+ seems like a major upgrade. Compared to the 2020 Wear 4100, Qualcomm promises “doubling CPU, GPU, camera, storage and video/audio performance”, “50% more battery life”, delivering “days of use”and “30% less”chip for more graceful designs.

Unlike the Wear 4100 at the time of its release, the W5 is built on a modern 4nm process. Qualcomm equipped the chip with four ARM Cortex A53 processors clocked at up to 1.7GHz and an Adreno A702 GPU. The plus version includes a second 22nm Cortex M55-based SOC for screenless background processes such as watch face updates, notifications, and tracking fitness statistics. Qualcomm is promising low-power blocks for Wi-Fi, GPS, and audio so that these features can be used without using the entire chip. The SoC supports an LTE modem, Wi-Fi 802.11n (aka Wi-Fi 4), and Bluetooth 5.3.

It’s hard to tell where the W5+ will fit in the hierarchy of Android smartwatch chips. Its competitor, the Samsung Exynos W920, has two A55 cores built on a 5nm process. Qualcomm has a technology node advantage, but Samsung is using newer cores and Qualcomm is using 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 wins in single-threaded and multi-threaded modes. At least Qualcomm’s chip is competitive, which hopefully marks a new era for the company to take the smartwatch market more seriously.

Qualcomm says it already has round and square watch reference designs from Compal and Pegatron ODMs ready to collaborate with partners. This will be useful for most Wear OS manufacturers, which are basically fashion brands that need a lot of outside help. Unless you’re making your own chips or have a seemingly exclusive Google deal with Samsung, Qualcomm is the only game in town for smartwatch chips, which is why the company says partners already have 25 projects in the works. Oppo and Mobvoi (the makers of TicWatch) are first out of the gate and are due to introduce new watches with chips this fall.