Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 4100 promises faster Wear OS smartwatches

Qualcomm today announces two new Wear OS processors, the Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus and Snapdragon Wear 4100, the first major updates to its smartwatch platform since 2018. Qualcomm claims the new chips will have vastly improved speed, with a “new processor significantly faster “And big leaps in GPU, memory, camera and overall battery life.

They are great promises, but in a nutshell, Google’s Wear operating system wrong You need this type of hardware revision. The last major overhaul of the Snapdragon Wear line, the Snapdragon Wear 3100, was a minor update to the 2016 Snapdragon 2100. In fact, since the 2100 and 3100 have the exact same main processor, the debut of the 4100 marks the first speed. concrete. improvements to Wear OS in about four years.

The biggest changes are in the processor, which is going from a 28nm to a 12nm process, with four 1.7GHz-synchronized A53 CPU cores replacing the 3100 A7 cores (at just 1.1GHz), which Qualcomm says is It should deliver more than 85 percent faster performance. The GPU is now Adreno A504 (up to two and a half times faster than the 3100), along with faster memory.

However, Qualcomm is taking a slightly different approach with the 4100 line. It is actually shipping two SKUs to developers. The flagship model is the Snapdragon 4100 Plus, which (just like the previous 3100) is a hybrid platform that features the main SDM429w SoC, along with an updated version of the always-on QCC1110 coprocessor that was introduced with the 3100. But for developers Not wanting or needing to offer always-on features, Qualcomm will also offer a standard Snapdragon Wear 4100 model, which only offers the SDM429w SoC.

However, for the Snapdragon 4100 Plus, the QCC1110 coprocessor, which handles the ambient display mode common to most modern smartwatches, is also receiving some improvements. These include the ability to display many more colors, up to 64,000, compared to the 16 colors the 3100 could display, as well as support for new features when in “watch mode,” such as step tracking, continuous heart rate tracking, alarms, haptic feedback and more (which previously had to rely on the main processor).

The move to the new 12nm CPU architecture (along with other more technical improvements) also means that watches with a Snapdragon 4100 should see up to 25 percent better battery life.

Qualcomm is already shipping its Wear 4100 and 4100 Plus chipsets to hardware makers, with the first devices set to arrive in the coming months. Mobvoi has already announced that it is working on a new TicWatch model that will feature the new chips, and Xiaotiancai is also working on a children’s smartwatch with Wear 4100 technology.

On paper, at least, these are the kinds of big improvements Qualcomm needed to make to help drive the tough Wear OS hardware ecosystem (which relies almost entirely on Qualcomm’s platform at this point) back into competitive gaming.

But the world of smart watches is a very different place now than it was in 2016, when the latest major improvements to the Qualcomm processor came, or even in 2018. Wear OS is largely dominated by fashion brands like Fossil, but all the The smartwatch ecosystem itself is dominated by Samsung’s Gear line and the Apple Watch.

Google’s own ambitions to make a flagship smartwatch are in the air. The company’s recent announcement that it intends to buy Fitbit for $ 2.1 billion may be a way to beef up its hardware division to make better Wear OS watches, or it may be for something entirely different.

After years of lackluster hardware and an apparently apathetic Google when it comes to developing new Wear OS software features, the question is whether Qualcomm’s new chip is too late for Google’s smartwatch experiment.