Aside from Google's apparent lack of interest on the platform, one of the things that's held back Wear OS for years is the fact that there aren't really good processors for smartwatches out there. Qualcomm finally introduced a refresh to its lineup last year, but even the Snapdragon Wear 3100 was mostly focused on improving the power efficiency by adding a new set of low-power processing cores, without much in the way of performance improvements.
Now, that could finally be set to change, according to a recent commit to the Code Aurora Forums (via XDA-Developers). The commit in question refers to a new chipset called Snapdragon Wear 3300, which would be a successor to the Wear 3100 that's currently inside many smartwatches. The new chipset would be based on the Snapdragon 429 Mobile Platform, which was released last year and is being used by devices such as the Nokia 3.2. This falls in line with another report from earlier this year.
Perhaps most notably, though, the Snapdragon 429 has four Cortex-A53 cores, which is something that's been missing in wearable chipsets from Qualcomm. Even the Snapdragon Wear 3100 used Cortex-A7 cores, which were first introduced in 2013, and it was still built on a 28nm architecture. For reference, Qualcomm used Cortex-A7 cores in the Snapdragon 200 and Snapdragon 400 chipsets, and not much else since then. Moving on to Cortex-A53 cores could help not just performance, but also power efficiency, since smaller architectures tend to use less power.
For now, there's no indication of when (and if) this chipset might see the light of day, but if it were to happen, it could help give Wear OS a much-needed boost to face off against the Apple Watch. Hopefully, we'll hear some confirmation from Qualcomm soon.
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