Recently, we were informed that Qualcomm is about to launch a new chip developed for smartwatches. And Qualcomm’s existing Wear 3100 will soon be replaced with the Wear 429 or Wear 2700. The new chip is expected to be produced in a 12nm process. Moreover, it’s rumored the SoC will get the Cortex-A53 CPU core and 64-bit support. As a reminder, the Wear 3100 is manufactured in a larger 28nm process and features four Cortex-A7 cores and supports only 32 bits. The new chip is also reduced in size, which allows Qualcomm to put more transistors into the Wear 429 / Wear 2700. In other words, the two new chips are more powerful and power efficient than the previous generation.
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The Wear 3100 is a low-power processing chip with a coprocessor that handles simple tasks that don’t require the full computing power of the Cortex-A7 core. This saves battery life and keeps the light on when the user is not interacting with the watch. The battery life of a smartwatch running Wear 3100 is between 36 and 60 hours.
Some sources claim that Qualcomm is testing the Wear 429 / Wear 2700. They should come with built-in 1GB LPDDR3 RAM and 8GB of eMMC storage. Also, the new chips are said to have a power-saving feature that can be assigned to low-power chips or core processing to save battery life. The name of the Wear 429 indicates that it is based on the Snapdragon 429 mobile platform, which also uses the 12nm process and uses the Cortex-A53 core. The Nokia 3.2 and other mobile phones use the Snapdragon 429 processor. Based on the similarity between the two chipsets, the Wear 429 can operate at the highest frequency of 2 GHz, while the Wear 3100 clocks at 1.2 GHz.
