Qualcomm made a modern smartwatch chip: Meet the Snapdragon Wear 4100

Qualcomm made a modern smartwatch chip: Meet the Snapdragon Wear 4100

4 years ago
Anonymous $qOHwDUKgAF

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/the-snapdragon-wear-4100-is-qualcomms-first-smartwatch-upgrade-in-six-years/

After years of repackaging the same basic smartwatch chip over and over again, Qualcomm has graced Wear OS with a modern smartwatch SoC. Meet the Snapdragon Wear 4100, a Qualcomm smartwatch chip that, for the first time ever, is faster than the previous chip.

The Wear 4100 uses four 1.7GHz Cortex A53 CPUs built on a 12nm manufacturing process, a major upgrade from the 28nm Cortex A7s that every other Qualcomm smartwatch chip has been up until now. It's not the state-of-the-art 7nm process that Qualcomm's high-end chip uses, and the Cortex A53 is an old CPU design, but for Qualcomm, it's a major upgrade. Between the new CPU, the Adreno 504 GPU, and faster memory, Qualcomm is promising "85% faster performance" compared to the Wear 3100.