Exclusive: New Snapdragon wearables chip in the works, could supercharge Wear OS watch performance

Wear OS smartwatches have been in a bit of a standstill lately. After releasing Snapdragon W5/+ Gen 1 in 2022, Qualcomm hasn’t given the platform any attention, with only Samsung continuing to develop new chips for wearables. Google smartwatches, for example, have been stuck on the same Qualcomm platform for three years now. There was some talk about possible RISC-V-based SoCs as well as next-generation chips for a while now, but without any concrete details.

That is, until now. has viewed credible evidence that Qualcomm is working on a new wearables platform and some of its specs. If it does see the light of day, it could give the next generation of Wear OS wearables a much-needed performance jump.

Historically, Qualcomm’s wear chips haven’t received the same attention to detail as its smartphone models. They are often existing smartphone chips with minor modifications, and some are also built on a newer process node. In fact, some of the earlier reference designs Qualcomm provides to OEMs use unmodified smartphone chips! Of course, some work still goes into them (like optimizing sensor hubs and wireless), but a fully bespoke design has never been a priority for Qualcomm. The only fully custom part of the platform was the external coprocessor chips, but even those were built in the cheapest way possible, utilizing a lot of off-the-shelf IP.

I compiled a table of Qualcomm’s past wearable chips, as well as the smartphone chips I assume they are based on:

It looks like Qualcomm might start taking the category more seriously now, though. Based on the information we viewed, a new chip called SW6100, codenamed Aspen, is currently in the testing phase at Qualcomm. We don’t know what the new chip will be called, but my guess is that it will either be W5 Gen 2 or W6 Gen 1.

We also learned quite a bit about it — first, it’s based on a TSMC process node. Unfortunately, we don’t know which specific one it is. Whatever the case, it should improve the platform’s efficiency, as Samsung process nodes are currently behind in that area. Additionally, the RAM controller was upgraded to support LPDDR5X (whereas W5 Gen 1 only supported LPDDR4), which should give a small but non-negligible battery life boost. There’s also the QCC6100 coprocessor, which we unfortunately don’t know anything about just yet.

We also found out the CPU core configuration — 1x Arm Cortex-A78 + 4x Arm Cortex-A55. This would represent a huge upgrade over the previous generation. Going from Cortex-A53 cores (first introduced in 2012, by the way) to a much newer Cortex-A55 cluster with an additional big core like Cortex-A78 should improve performance. Surprisingly, Qualcomm isn’t the only one putting that config into a wearable chip, as the Samsung Exynos W1000 uses the exact same one.

Of course, these cores are still dated, and it would be nice to see something newer in a watch someday, but they’re still a huge improvement over the previous generations. Hopefully, it was a calculated decision to provide better efficiency instead of extra performance that’s probably not needed in a watch anyway.

What’s interesting is that Qualcomm was working with Google to bring RISC-V wear chips to the market. This leak suggests that’s not happening anytime soon, if ever. The Cortex-A78 core in SW6100 is also surprising — there are almost no licensable RISC-V cores that are that powerful, so it will be intriguing to see how Qualcomm handles that.

We don’t know when the new chip will be released, but if it does reach production, we could see it in Wear OS smartwatches in 2026.