Qualcomm unveiled two of the latest processor chips for smart watches this morning, namely the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 which use 4nm technology. It takes the place of the Snapdragon Wear 4100+ that launched two years ago.
This chip promises a performance increase of up to two times but at the same time reduces energy consumption by up to 50%. This in turn will increase the battery life of smart watches which typically only last up to two days.
The chip is also 30% smaller reducing the space required on the clock motherboard. In addition it also supports bluetooth 5.3, a better power consumption reduction mode for sleep tracking and health tracking capabilities around the clock.
The Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 series is equipped with four Cortex A53 cores and one Cortex M55 core which is matched to the A702 GPU. The only difference between the W5 and W5+ is that on the W5 there is no additional AON Cortex M55 chip which is always active but uses low power to process voice commands, play music and manage notifications received by the clock.
The first two manufacturers to use the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and W5+ Gen 1 chips are Oppo and Mobvoi. Qualcomm also said another 25 hours were also confirmed to use the latest chips that support Wear OS and RTOS operating systems.