Although for several years it gave the impression that the market for wearable devices was in a phase of absolute stagnation, the year 2021, when Google announced a new version of Wear OS and a collaboration with Samsung He seems to have been nasty which sector he was waiting for recharge. So in about a year, we could see more and more manufacturers decide to raise the stakes and celebrate.

And now, with Qualcomm’s announcement its new SoC Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1The panorama is more promising than ever, as the technology shows an exceptional qualitative leap with improvements in both performance and consumption, two key factors in any type of device, but given the particularly small size of wearable devices, it becomes more important.

The short version of what the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and W5+ Gen 1 SoCs bring to the previous generation is that according to Qualcomm, this new Snapdragon W5+ platform offers twice the performance, reduces energy consumption by 50% Plus, is reduced by 30%. Some of the numbers are impressive, as it is not common to see such sharp jumps from one generation to the next, and this could put Apple’s dominance in check with its Apple Watch, which will now have to contend with much higher-powered smartwatches.

Made in scale of four nanometersthe Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 will be based on the design Quad-core Cortex-A53 @ 1.7 Gigahertz accompanied by a Adreno A702 GPU and hardware support for artificial intelligence with integrated Qualcomm Hexagon DSP V66K and ARM Ethos-U55. With respect to the previous platform, the size reduction that this evolution proposes does not lose elements, on the contrary, it adds new functions.

offer such a huge leap in quality, the chip is supported by the Qualcomm QCC5100, a co-processor produced on a scale of 22 nanometers and it will be responsible for managing a large part of the basic functions of the smart watch. And what does this achieve? Well, the functions that must remain active when the user is not using the watch are managed by a very low-power chip, and this also allows the integrated functions to be activated and deactivated on demand.

And how does it work? Smart watches are known to spend most of their time in standby mode, so the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 platform spreads the work, thanks to which the high-performance Cortex-A53 quad-core processor is responsible for the functions. when the watch is actively used and managed by Wear OS. For its part, all work in standby mode it is delegated to the Qualcomm QCC5100, which manages FreeRTOSwhich always runs in the background.

Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1: technical specifications

More information: Qualcomm