Competitive smartwatch chipsets that can make clocking faster!
Qualcomm announced two chipsets for smartwatches and other wearables. They are the W5 Gen 1 and the W5+ Gen 1. Both are manufactured on a 4nm process. The differences between these two mostly lie in the AON co-processor that the W5 Gen 1 lacks. This processor is mostly used for better power-saving in which, according to Qualcomm, the base W5 doesn’t need because it will be used in “segment-specific” wearables.
Compared to the Snapdragon 4100 series, these new chipsets provide 50% better battery life, are 30% smaller, and provide twice the performance. It has support for Low-power Bluetooth 5.3, Deep Sleep, and low-power islands. Qualcomm and Google have collaborated to ensure that WearOS is as optimized as possible for the new wearables.
There will be more than 25 manufacturers that will be using this chipset. The first ones are Oppo and Mobvoi. The latter is a Chinese smartwatch company known for their TicWatch series.
Going back to the AON (always-on) co-processor, this 22nm chipset is only available for the Plus variant, and this handles most of the background tasks, speech, audio playback, and notifications while also being power-efficient. This allows the functioning of the aforementioned low-power and Hibernate features with the W5+, in addition to Wi-Fi, and GNSS. LTE is also arriving soon.
The W5 series is comprised of five CPU cores. Four of which are Cortex-A53 cores and the other is the Cortex-M55 efficiency core clocked at 250Mhz. There is a 1GHz A702 GPU included as well. Qualcomm has collaborated with Compel and Pegatron to make prototype devices to run the new chipsets.
Source: Qualcomm
You must be logged in to post a comment.