Wear OS Weekly
This new weekly column focuses on the current state of Wear OS, from new developments and updates to the latest apps and features to look out for.
Qualcomm didn’t announce any new wearable SoCs at Snapdragon Summit 2024, but I had a chance to speak with Dino Bekis, Qualcomm’s VP and GM of Wearables, about what to expect from Wear OS hardware going forward. there was. He hinted that a new Snapdragon Wear SoC will be announced “next year,” hinting that it will be a more “feature-focused” and “AI-driven” chip than before.
In the world of smartwatches, we’ve become accustomed to SoC stagnation. While dozens of new smartphone and tablet chipsets come out every year, smartwatch brands are constantly releasing watches with the same processor (currently Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 due out in 2022) due to lack of choice. Release. Unless Samsung can manufacture its own Exynos hardware, you’ll be working with what you have.
In 2023, Qualcomm and Google announced they were co-developing the open-source RISC-V Snapdragon Wear platform, which moves away from Arm cores for more efficient custom-built CPUs. That sounded promising, but a year later, Qualcomm focused on the Snapdragon 8 Elite with a custom Oryon core at the summit and said little about wearables.
When I first casually spoke to Bekis during the Snapdragon Summit dinner, he mentioned that he was disappointed in the lack of Wear hardware. There he hinted for the first time at Snapdragon Wear chips in 2025.
So I sat down with him to get more details he could share about the Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 (or what Qualcomm calls it), watch chip rarity, and what to expect from future Snapdragon-powered smartwatches. I arranged an interview.
Why custom RISC-V (or Oryon) is the future of Wear OS watches
Up until now, smartwatches using Arm cores have had the challenge of scaling up to smartphone-level functionality with an order of magnitude smaller battery, Bekis said. Now they’re “considering something new,” which isn’t surprising considering the current legal battle between Qualcomm and Arm.
Google, Qualcomm, and other partners envisioned RISC-V as a way to create custom open-source CPUs with low power requirements and high performance. A year later, Bekis emphasized that “hardware is one thing,” but porting the current Wear OS is another. software Apps run natively on new silicon. Qualcomm and Google are currently “working on it,” but I’m guessing that RISC-V software optimization is targeted for 2025.
I asked Bekis what the difference is between RISC-V and Qualcomm Oryon when it comes to potential custom silicon solutions for wearables. He brought up scalability again, noting that Qualcomm’s typical workflow is to first focus on high-power PCs (Snapdragon X Elite), then scale down to mobile (Snapdragon 8 Elite), then scale power demands back up. I explained that it meant going down. Challenge the wearable level.
He certainly didn’t rule out the idea that future Snapdragon W5 chips might use Oryon cores, but he also said that Oryon isn’t necessarily “better” than RISC-V. Their goal is to aim for “a week’s worth of battery life” with Wear OS, he said, and to determine which hardware options can achieve that. Whether it’s the Snapdragon W5 Elite or an open source solution, it doesn’t matter to Bekis.
Qualcomm may have developed the RISC-V core and the wearable Oryon core at the same time, but my guess from experience is that the latter will take more time to materialize, first and foremost to fulfill its current partnership with Google. I think it will take a while.
Why smartwatches have so few chipsets
I asked Qualcomm’s vice president why we haven’t seen a wider variety of smartwatch chipsets. For example, due to the lack of high-end SoCs available, luxury watches like the Galaxy Watch Ultra can only differentiate themselves through design. I also don’t see competitors like MediaTek trying to enter the wearables market.
Bekis again brought up the similar requirements that smartwatches have to phones. Although the display may be small, it requires a robust GPU, power islands for always-on functionality, and hardware offload. This difficult balance, and the limited number of clients producing Wear OS-level watches, discourages other companies from entering the fray.
As for Qualcomm’s own strategy, it said demand for new chips from smartwatch makers is “every two to three years.” According to him, it’s not want New chips are introduced every year. Presumably, each hardware change would require a watch redesign and a lot of R&D. This is more than you need for a smartphone that balances power and heat easily.
Instead, OEMs want a platform that is “scalable for multiple years” with annual software updates. This explains the gap from 2022 Snapdragon W5 Plus Gen 1 onwards, as for Qualcomm “hardware frequencies are about what the investment profile can tolerate.”
Even if the Pixel Watch 3 can add new software tricks and deliver solid performance even with two-year-old technology, Qualcomm doesn’t. need This is to put money into new chips that Google doesn’t yet need.
I wish a top-of-the-line watch like the Ultra had a chipset on par with the flagship chipset, but Android watches aren’t the same as Android smartphones. Finding power for more performance will probably cause a lot of problems and make it worthless.
How will next-generation wearable platforms innovate?
I asked Bekis what he meant by a “more feature-focused” Wear chipset. He explained that the goal is to bring wearables closer to PCs.
Bekis explained that computers are flexible computing-based platforms with enough “headroom” to run the apps you want for years. This is also the goal for wearable SoCs, which aim to create a “dynamic, flexible platform for OEMs to innovate” with “more on-device AI capabilities” and “more compute capabilities” while reducing power consumption. is to create.
More simply, we want to increase the threshold for OEMs to experiment with different features so that the features they offer are not uniform and annual updates are less difficult to implement.
What can Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 do with this headroom? Bekis talked a lot about AI capabilities. The company overall believes that LLM will soon be able to scale to low-power devices such as smartwatches and smart glasses trained on about 1 to 3 billion parameters.
This upgrade allows the watch to support natural language processing without relying on your phone or the cloud, even when there are fewer parameters and results are less accurate. AI-enhanced command understanding makes results even more useful in retrieving relevant data. Bekis also mentioned the possibility of applications such as live translation of speech from the wrist.
He claimed that the AI enhancements on Wear OS will bring further benefits to health analytics and privacy. He gave the example of watches relying on sending personal data to the cloud to be analyzed and send useful insights. If the watch had proper edge computing for health data, it would make the data more private. and Allows you to analyze potential problems faster.
Qualcomm and Masimo recently partnered to develop a health-focused reference device for smartwatch OEMs. In the announcement, Bekis claimed that the device “expands the range of smartwatch options for consumers” by providing OEMs with a “robust, production-ready design.”
In our interview, he said that Masimo will bring “clinical” precision to Wear OS watches in the future, and that OEMs like Google, which had previously developed their own sensors, will We reiterated our belief that we would be happy to borrow Masimo’s expertise in areas such as sensor placement. , proper electricity flow.
