Snapdragon W5 and W5 + Gen1 without secrets: new SoCs for smartwatches revealed
A few days ago Qualcomm anticipated the arrival of a new generation of SoCs for wearable devices, limiting itself to pointing out that it would be presented soon. Meanwhile, Evleaks has seen fit to spoil the surprise by publishing three slides (apparently coming from Qualcomm) full of details on the technical characteristics.
The name of the new platform would be Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and, like the previous one, it will include a basic variant and a plus. The new nomenclature archives the one adopted up to the Snapdragon Wear 4100 line and is in line with the name of the most recent Qualcomm SoC for smartphones. But the gist of the news lies not so much in the name as in the specifications, starting with the reference to the 4nm production process which would represent a nice step forward compared to the 12nm of Snapdragon Wear 4100/4100 +.
The material shared by the source (the first slide focuses on the W5 + Gen 1) confirms updates of the CPU and GPU compartments, faster memories (LPDDR4 @ 2133Mhz), and improvements on the machine learning front (a dedicated component is mentioned). The wireless sector has also received significant changes with the arrival of Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity, while on the audio front you can see the reference to the integrated speaker. Everything is enclosed in an SoC that has smaller dimensions than the previous generation, with intuitive advantages on the integration side in the bodies of smartwatches.
Specifically, in the transition from Snapdragon Wear 4100+ to the new platform (from the second slide) we would have:
- 50% longer battery life
- size reduced by 30%
- performance doubled
Interestingly, the second slide refers to the first companies that will use the new SoC, in particular Oppo and Mobvoi. Just yesterday it was Mobvoi who announced the arrival of a new top range TicWatch and we hypothesized that it could use the new Qualcomm SoC (not yet announced, we remember it); this hypothesis now assumes consistency in the light of the material provided by Evleaks. In total, at least 25 devices based on the new platform would be in the pipeline.
The implications in the wearable device market are not negligible: the new platform could give a new boost to the production and sale of Wear OS-based smartwatches, a sector that, net of the contribution made by Samsung and Google with version 3 of the operating system and the Exynos W920 chip (at 5nm), has been pretty stagnant over the past year. More autonomy thanks to the 4nm production process also means more functions that can be concretely exploited (think, for example, of those related to the Ambient mode) and therefore give potential buyers new incentives to buy the product.
