New Qualcomm socs for wearables extend battery life by up to 50 percent – update
Qualcomm is working on new Wear chips that would extend the battery life of wearables by fifty percent. This appeared from leaked slides, but has since been confirmed by the company. The socs are made on a 4nm node and 25 different smartwatches with these chips are planned.
It was already known that Qualcomm was working on new chips for wearables and the company hinted before that they will appear soon. Earlier it was rumored that these Wear-socs are produced at 4nm. Evleaks now has details about the wearable chip released. Qualcomm comes with two new chips for smartwatches: the W5+ Gen 1 and the W5 Gen 1. The leaker shows three information sheets stating that the W5 Gen 1 chips provide fifty percent longer battery life on smartwatches compared to the Snapdragon 4100+, the most the company’s recent wearable soc.
The chips support Bluetooth 5.3 and can put the smartwatches in an extra deep sleep mode, so that the battery life would last even longer. The chips also have support for health sensors that continuously measure.
Smartwatches could also get a much thinner design with the new chips. The sheets state that in any case, the Wear 5+ Gen 1-soc will be thirty percent smaller than its predecessor. The surface of the chips is at 90mm² a lot smaller than the Wear 4100+. It measures 100mm² for the soc and another 28mm² for the power management integrated circuits. With the Wear 5+ Gen 1 chip, this is integrated in the soc itself. Height also improves; it goes from 0.69mm to 0.48mm.
The chip would also be up to two times faster than its predecessor. The Wear 5+ Gen 1 has four Cortex-A53 cores and a Cortex-M55 core with a clock speed of 250MHz and 16GB of Lpddr4-2133 memory. The sheets state that there are already at least 25 wearables in development that use it.
Update, 6:15 PM: Qualcomm has the socs now officially announced in a press release. The manufacturer also announces that the Oppo Watch 3 Series will be on the market in August.