Qualcomm is making a next-gen Snapdragon chip for smartwatches with major performance upgrades

Qualcomm

Qualcomm is gearing up to introduce a new Snapdragon chipset for wearables. This new SoC is expected to boost the performance of the next generation of WearOS wearable devices. Moreover, it will likely replace the Snapdragon W5 series, which was released in 2022. The chip is said to have been codenamed Aspen with a model number SW6100, which will likely be marketed as the Snapdragon Wear W6.

Upcoming Snapdragon chip for wearables: Expected specifications

According to a report by Android Authority, Qualcomm is manufacturing a new Snapdragon SoC, built specifically for wearable devices. It is claimed to have a model number SW6100, where the letters SW in the model number stand for Snapdragon Wear. It falls in line with the model number of the Snapdragon Wear W5 Gen 1, which is SW5100. Moreover, it could be internally called Aspen.

As for the chipset’s architecture, the SW6100 could feature a single-core Arm Cortex-A78 and four-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPUs, paired with an LPDDR5X RAM controller, built on a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) process node. The report also suggests that it could have huge performance gains over its previous generations, which came with the Arm Cortex-A53 CPU cluster.

Further, the Snapdragon SW6100 will also support LPDDR5X RAM as opposed to previous chips' LPDDR4 RAM, improving app loading speed and power efficiency of upcoming wearables. It is reportedly being built from scratch, and could be used in next-generation Wear OS smartwatches from brands like OnePlus, OPPO, TicWatch, and Xiaomi, which will likely compete against newly launched Galaxy 8 series smartwatches.