Qualcomm’s next SoC platform for Smartwatches is called Snapdragon Wear 3100, as expected beforehand. Qualcomm is not moving away from the basic design of its predecessor, Snapdragon Wear 2100, but instead is using an economical co-processor to ensure long runtimes and make the Smartwatch more of a real watch.
And first of all we’d like to say that Qualcomm is still manufacturing the Snapdragon Wear 3100 in 28 nm, and the Mobile Station Modem (MSM) is the same with the 8909w and four Cortex A7 cores up to 1.2 GHz. The SoC itself is subject to interesting changes under the hood, and the most important part of today’s announcement is a new coprocessor, aimed at making the new Smartwatch platform more efficient with long battery life.
What’s new in Snapdragon Wear 3100?
The Snapdragon Wear 3100 is Qualcomm’s first platform designed specifically for Smartwatches, where earlier SoCs were originally designed for smartphones and were only reduced in size for Smartwatches. The new platform divides Qualcomm into segments for simple (Tiny), medium (Little) and complex calculations (Big) and assigns them to the Co-processor, DSP and Cortex-A7 components.
New platform kicker is the QCC1110 co-processor, which occupies an area of only 4 × 5.2 mm regardless of the 28 nm production used. While consuming minimal energy, the co-processor undercuts the Application Processor (AP) of the SoC by a factor of 20. The co-processor comes with its own SRAM and runs on a real-time operating system (RTOS). This allows Qualcomm to put the Smartwatch into new modes via the additional chip.