Smartwatches are very popular, and for many reasons. They serve the basic purpose that a wristwatch should, which is telling the time. However, on top of that, you can use them to track notifications from your phone, answer phone calls, and record all sorts of health metrics that your phone can't come to doing. They're versatile little computers.
Being computers though, they need chips to process everything that they do. Qualcomm is the top option for most OEMs when it comes to wearables, but its last chip dates back to 2022. We're not sure exactly when it might be coming, but we could finally see a more powerful chip succeed the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1.
Qualcomm Is Finally a Making a Successor to Its Dated Processor for Wearables
Even though the computational needs of a smartwatch are a lot smaller than a smartphone, it doesn't mean that the processor running the show can afford to be outdated or slow. You don't want to try and scroll through a menu on your smartwatch and have to wait half a second to see a change.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 chip is its current flagship wearable SoC, but it was released back in 2022. That's old. Samsung makes its own processors for its wearables, and it released a new chip, the Exynos W1000, around this time last year, so that's one company that isn't neglecting power in its wearables. That certainly doesn't help competitors that have to make do with what Qualcomm gives them for performance.
| Wearable Chip | Launch Date |
| Samsung Exynos W1000 | July 3rd, 2024 |
| Samsung Exynos W930 | July 26th, 2023 |
| Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 | July 20th, 2022 |
| Samsung Exynos W920 | August 10th, 2021 |
Very soon, that sob story could be a thing of the past though. After so long, all evidence points to Qualcomm working on a new chip, according to the folks over at Android Authority. The Snapdragon W5 Gen 2, perhaps? Time will tell what the naming strategy will be.
The Next-Gen Wearable Processor From Qualcomm Could Be a Big Performance Boost
Qualcomm's wearable chips tend to be built on the platform of existing smartphone chips that it has made, and with that knowledge, you'd assume that make it easier for the company to release SoCs for smartwatches. Unfortunately, that's not the case, despite it taking the easy way out instead of making custom chips.
However, this year, it looks like things might actually be taken seriously. A new Qualcomm chip is coming and its codename is “Aspen”, and the model name is SW6100. It is still in the testing phase, which makes it likely we won't be seeing it until next year. However, thanks to Android Authority, we know quite a bit about its specifications, including:
- Based on a TSMC process node
- LPDDR5X RAM support
- 1 Arm Cortex-A78 core + 4x Arm Cortex-A55 cores
While that might not seem like too much info, compared to the W5 Gen 1, it's a pretty major performance boost. The core configuration is the same as Samsung's Exynos W1000, so I won't be surprised to see it as a similar 3nm chip. Smartwatch OEMs, outside of Samsung, should be very pleased with this development.
