Qualcomm makes Snapdragon Wear-soc more economical with co-processor

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon Wear 3100, the successor to the Snapdragon Wear 2100 from two years ago. The soc should give wearables a longer battery life, partly due to a co-processor.

The basis of the Snapdragon Wear 3100 is still the quartet of Cortex A7 cores, just like the 2100, which can be found a lot in wearables from the past year. However, Qualcomm integrates the QCC1110 on the soc; the company speaks of a Big-Small-Tiny setup. The QCC1110 is a chip with dimensions of 5.2mm×4mm that consumes up to twenty times less than the application processor of the previous soc. In combination with optimized DSPs, this would lead to battery improvements in voice commands, music playback and GPS use, among other things.

The new co-processor handles the processing of, among other things, sensor data and takes care of the ambient screen display. That display, where a watch face is continuously displayed, supports up to sixteen colors, now offers live complications and can handle adaptive screen brightness. In addition, there’s a new economy mode where only the wearable shows only a watch face, and largely deactivates Wear OS. This can last up to a month, but can also be used when the battery is almost empty. With a battery remainder of 20 percent, and a battery of 340mAh, the display is then still available for a maximum of one week.

Also new is that Qualcomm will give wearable makers the option to write code for sensors themselves. In any case, Fossil, Louis Vuitton and Montblanc are going to make wearables with the Snapdragon Wear 3100, according to Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is releasing three variants of the Wear 3100: one for connections via Bluetooth and WiFi, one for wearables with LTE and one for models with GPS. The company has started supplying manufacturers.