Qualcomm To Use Next-Gen Snapdragon W5 Plus Gen 1 And Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 SoCs For Wearables
Qualcomm, a primary manufacturer of chips for handheld devices is reportedly working on two new SoCs (System on a Chip) for wearables. The official names are Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and Snapdragon W5 Plus Gen 1, where the latter may be used on higher end devices. These chips allegedly feature a new AI engine increasing machine learning based performance.
The newer chips are built on a more efficient and smaller 4nm process node as compared to the 12nm chip used by the old Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus. This allows for efficient heat transfer and an overall reduction in the SoC size. As for the official numbers, Qualcomm promises 50% longer battery life and a 30% smaller and thinner design. Although, it is still unclear whether Samsung or TSMC‘s technology is being used.
Qualcomm claims that their new SoCs will alow for multiple low power modes and 25 designs in the pipeline signalling that many companies will use these new chips. The key phrase here is “Our Most Advanced Leap Yet“.
These next gen chips are to use Qualcomm’s Adreno 702 GPU and the CPU department will comprise of four Cortex-A53 cores and one Cortex-M55 running at 250MHz. Features such as Find My Device, ECG, Motion Sensing, Optical Sensing, Low Power Speech, PPG Biosensing etc will make these devices full of life and attractive for the customers.
A summary of the specifications offered by the next gen chips by Qualcomm in comparison with the last gen chips is that the W5+ Gen 1 SoC has:
- 50% more power efficiency
- 2x more performance
- 2x more features
- 30% reduction in size
It seems as if Qualcomm has started to take wearables seriously as Apple has a serious monopoly established in this department. With their next gen mobile chips beating out Apple’s A15 Bionic chip, it will not be long until Qualcomm poses a serious threat to Apple, maybe even overtaking them. Apple is invincible in the desktop CPU market due to their unrivalled efficiency and performance, but all of that is not magic.
Apple uses the ARM ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), whereas Intel and AMD use the ancient x86. Surprisingly, for mobile SoCs, Qualcomm also uses ARM making them on par with Apple. Therefore, the company having the best microarchitecture will take the lead.
