4nm Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 and W5+ announced for wearables

Qualcomm has new chipsets for wearables called the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and W5+ Gen 1, which have 4nm lithography.

The W5 Gen 1 and W5+ Gen1

New Snapdragon chips for smartwatches!

The chipmaker claimed that these two will offer 2x the speed while only consuming half the power over the previous Snapdragon Wear 4100+ Platform.

The W5+ vs its predecessor

The W5+ can offer up to 50 percent more battery life in most situations while taking up 30 percent less space than earlier models. Qualcomm and Google have collaborated intensively for the past few quarters to make Wear OS suitable for the new SoC.

What differentiates the W5 and the Plus model is that the standard version does not have the so-called AON Co-Processor. It plans to use the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 in segment-specific wearables because those devices won't need the additional power-saving features. Wearables for the China, Kids, Seniors, Health, and Business segments are included in this.

W5 series features

The W5+ version comprises four Cortex A53 cores and a Cortex M55 efficiency core closed at 250MHz. It has an A702 GPU with a clock speed of 1GHz and upgraded memory which now supports 2133MHz LPDDR4. Moreover, they also added a new Machine Learning unit called U55 in the chipset.

The new co-processor in the W5+ can manage more background operations while consuming less power. The 22nm AON (always on) Co-processor manages all the wearable sensors and handles speech processing, audio playback, and notifications. In addition, the AON chip will also allow power-efficient Bluetooth 5.3, WiFI, and GNSS and adds support for new power states such as Deep Sleep and Hibernate. A low-power modem update is also coming to LTE.

To aid partners in developing devices more quickly, Qualcomm announced a collaboration with Compel and Pegatron to produce reference smartwatches with the Snapdragon W5+ on board.

Lastly, brands like Mobvoi and OPPO will be the first OEMs to unveil devices powered by the new Snapdragon SoC. Qualcomm also stated that there are around 25 smartwatch concepts presently undergoing development.

What do you guys think?

Source: Qualcomm