Qualcomm posts teaser for announcement of new smartwatch soc

Chip designer Qualcomm has posted a teaser for the introduction of a new soc for smartwatches. The latest, the Snapdragon Wear 4100, came out two years ago. The soc probably ends up mainly in Wear OS watches.

Qualcomm teaser for Wear soc

Qualcomm posted the teaser with the text ‘the clock is ticking for something big’, an obvious reference to smartwatches. In addition, the video, which shows a soc, contains the text ‘wear what matters’. That’s a reference to Wear OS, Google’s operating system for smartwatches. The video also shows the casing of a watch.

The new version of Wear OS was released last year on Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4, equipped with an Exynos W920 soc from Samsung itself. It is much more modern and faster than Qualcomm’s Wear 4100. There are few rumors about the successor to the Wear 4100, except for a February rumor that it will be a 4nm soc with the same processor cores and clock speeds as the Wear 4100.

In recent years, Snapdragon socs for smartwatches have mainly ended up in the countless smartwatches of fashion brands, which use a set of standard components. Mobvoi also uses the socs in its TicWatch watches. Google’s Pixel Watch would run on an older Exynos soc.

Qualcomm has switched to new names for its socs for smartphones, such as Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. In that line, the new soc may be called Snapdragon Wear Gen 1. If the name of Wear socks remains the same, it would be a Wear 5100.