Qualcomm has now produced three generations of smartwatch chipsets. The first round of Android Wear watches ran on the Snapdragon 400, then came the Snapdragon Wear 2100, which was actually designed for wearables. And most recently, the Snapdragon Wear 3100 added new components for better power management.
One thing that hasn"t changed throughout the generation is that they"re all based on ARM Cortex-A7, and the latter two chipsets use an Adreno 304 GPU. That means that there hasn"t been a meaningful performance upggrade for Wear OS watches since the OS first began as Android Wear. Features have been added, but without better hardware, the software gets slower.
As it turns out, Qualcomm might finally be working on a new chipset for wearables that"s built on a new architecture, this time Cortex-A53, according to a report from WinFuture. Apparently, it"s going to be a custom version of the Snapdragon 429 chipset, although that doesn"t exactly give us a lot of clues. A wearable variant will have a lot of changes.
While the most significant change would come in terms of performance, we can also expect to see things like Bluetooth 5.0, and it"s being tested on 1GB LPDDR3 memory and 8GB eMMC storage. It will also likely include the same big-small-tiny architecture introduced with the Snapdragon Wear 3100.
It"s unclear when the new chip, possibly called Snapdragon Wear 2700, will arrive to market. It"s still in a stage called equipment verification testing.