Qualcomm, which has largely ignored the smart wearables market for a long time, may finally be getting serious about developing more powerful processors for watches. According to a report from Android Authority, the company is working on a new chip that will be significantly more powerful than existing solutions on the market.
Qualcomm's latest smartwatch processors, the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and W5+ Gen 1, were released back in 2022, but they're still used in devices like this year's OneWatch Plus 3, which recently received a smaller version . However, according to new information, the company is already testing a new SW6100 chip, known internally as Aspen. It will likely be released as the Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 or W6 Gen 1.
The new processor is manufactured using TSMC's process technology, but it's not yet known which one. However, even so, this is an improvement that should increase performance. In addition, the new product will have support for LPDDR5X, as opposed to LPDDR4 in the W5 Gen 1, which, among other things, will improve energy efficiency. As for other details, the SW6100 will have a QCC6100 coprocessor, about which nothing is known yet.
Where there are a few more details is in the CPU configuration. It will get one Arm Cortex-A78 core and four Arm Cortex-A55 cores. This should give a pretty noticeable performance boost, considering that the W5 Gen 1 uses Cortex-A53 cores, first introduced back in 2012, versus the 2017 A55.
Another mystery surrounding Qualcomm's new processor is its availability. Currently, only internal testing is reported, but under the best conditions, the SW6100 could be seen in smartwatches as early as 2026.