Behold the new wearable chipsets, the Snapdragon Wear 5 Plus from Qualcomm

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon has been synonymous with powering flagship Android smartphones, today the company has unveiled its latest Wear OS watch chip. Thus far, Snapdragon Wear chips have been repurposed mobile processor designs built on outdated tech and are a big reason why Wear OS watches have been so lackluster. But today, Qualcomm is launching an overhauled wearables platform called Snapdragon W5 Plus and W5. And this time, it seems like Qualcomm means business.

The company is ditching the Snapdragon Wear branding. That might seem irrelevant, but it’s more like a symbolic fresh slate. Instead, the new W5 Plus and W5 chips will be folded under the main Snapdragon umbrella. The W5 Plus is envisioned for premium smartwatches, while the W5 is meant for simpler devices like smartwatches for kids, fitness trackers, and enterprise devices. And, according to Qualcomm’s global head of smart wearables, Pankaj Kedia, both chips are specifically built for wearable devices. As in, they’ve not repurposed smartphone chips.

Spec-wise, the platform keeps the hybrid architecture featured in the Snapdragon Wear 3100 and 4100 chips. There’s the main processor for interactive tasks and an always-on coprocessor to help conserve battery. For the W5 Plus, Qualcomm is making a huge leap from 12nm to 4nm on the main chip and from 28nm to 22nm on the coprocessor. For context, Samsung’s Exynos W920, which powers the Galaxy Watch 4, uses 5nm process tech. Apple’s S7 chip for the Apple Watch Series 7 uses a 7nm process. This isn’t to say the W5 Plus is automatically better because it’s on 4nm — it’s more that Qualcomm is finally using current process tech like its peers.

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With the W5 Plus platform, the always-on coprocessor powers features that were previously handled by the main SoC. They include audio, keyword detection for digital assistants, and notifications via low-power Bluetooth 5.3. Meanwhile, health tracking features like monitoring sleep and heart rate are also handled by the coprocessor. Kedia says the coprocessor can also support onboard machine learning, though we’ll have to see if and how companies make use of that.

The main processor is only used for interactive features like calling, 3D watch faces and animation, or GPS navigation. Qualcomm’s press release says the result is 50 percent longer battery life, double the performance, and a 30 percent reduction in size compared to the 4100 platforms. The company says that Bluetooth watches with an always-on display sporting a 300mAh battery will see roughly 15 hours of additional battery. Because these numbers are based on Qualcomm’s own internal research, it’s impossible to say just yet how that’ll translate to, say, an actual Fossil smartwatch.

It should be noted that the biggest change is there’ll hardly be a wait before the first Snapdragon W5-powered watches hit shelves. Oppo says it’ll be the first to launch a watch on the W5 platform with the Oppo Watch 3 in August. Meanwhile, Mobvoi says its next TicWatch will launch this fall with the W5 Plus chip.