Qualcomm Snapdragon 3300 is set to perform faster and go longer
The Wear OS side of the smartwatch market may get more interesting soon. Qualcomm is reportedly working on the next Wear 3300 chip which will come with faster performance and better battery life.
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The current-genereation Qualcomm wearable platform is the Snapdragon Wear 3100. It was unveiled in September last year and brought low-power modes, sports watch-focused tweaks and improved always-on watch faces. However the processor essentially combines new technology with the same core design from a 2013 chip, plus it uses an outdated 28nm fabrication process.
The fact that were are now hearing about Wear 3300 suggests the upgrade is pretty big. The reference to a “SDW3300 device” (short for Snapdragon Wear 3300) was spotted by a code developer over at XDA-Developers.
The chip will reportedly be based on a 12nm fabrication process. This is important because a smaller nanometre size requires less power to operate and generates less heat. This equates to performance and battery improvements.
There were also references to the Snapdragon 429 spotted in the code and this jives with a story we ran back in July based on info from WinFuture. This revealed Qualcomm is working on a chipset based on the mobile platform that was released in 2018.
While this may not sound too promising it is actually a pretty big upgrade as the processor would come packing 64-bit support and four CPU Cortex-A53 cores running at close to 2GHz. The platforms in testing apparently come with 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of memory which doubles the storage of most current Wear OS watches. It also significantly improves on Snapdragon Wear 3100’s 28nm Cortex-A7 cores.
It took a while but we are seeing more and more watches with the 3100 platform. The 429 chip is still work in progress and there’s no official word yet from Qualcomm on any of this, but the hope is it will launch in 2020. The update will ensure future Wear OS smartwatches perform better than ever.
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