Qualcomm chipsets power most Android smartphones and Wear OS smartwatches across the globe. However, the last hardware that the company produced for wearables was in 2020, which was the Snapdragon 4100 and 4100+ chipsets. It really needed to refresh its wearable chipsets, and it seems like the updated chips are finally on their way.
As per some new information coming in from WinFuture, Qualcomm is indeed working on the next-generation Snapdragon Wear 5100 and 5100+ SoCs. This is not the first time we've heard about the new chipsets. Notably, information about the new generation of Snapdragon Wear chips have been pouring in for the last few months.
Reports say that both the 5100 and 5100+ chipsets are being built on Samsung's 4nm process. To give you some perspective, Samsung Galaxy Watch 4's Exynos W920 is made on the 5nm process, and it is perfectly optimized to run Wear OS. Now, that the Snapdragon 5100 and 5100+ are reportedly building on Samsung's 4nm process, it could be even more efficient.
We might not see a huge jump in CPU performance in the Snapdragon 5100 SoCs
Qualcomm seems to be sticking with the same 1.7GHz ARM Cortex-A53 cores that it used in the Wear 4100 and 4100+. So, we may not see a huge jump in CPU performance in these next-gen chipsets.
The GPU, however, could see a drastic performance improvement, similar to the Exynos 920. Qualcomm is expected to be going ahead with the 700MHz Adreno 702 GPU in Snapdragon Wear 5100 chipsets, which is an upgrade from the 320MHz Adreno 504 it used in the old 4100 series. Speaking of the difference between the SW5100 and SW5100+ chipsets, it will also boil down to the packaging.
The Plus variant will be more compact and could be more battery efficient, thanks to the QCC5100 coprocessor it comes bundled with. As of now, there is no clarity on when the Snapdragon Wear 5100 and 5100+ chipsets will debut officially.
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