Qualcomm has announced its latest chipset for wearables called Snapdragon Wear 3100 (MSM8909w / APQ8009w). The SoC is successor to Snapdragon Wear 2100 which was announced back in 2016. It was launched at an event in San Francisco and supported by Google.
The Snapdragon Wear 3100 platform for smartwatches is based on a new ultra-low power system architecture, which is designed to deliver a rich interactive mode, personalized experience and enhanced battery life (up to 67% reduction in lowest power mode, 49% reduction in GPS, 43% reduction in keyword detection, 35% reduction in per minute clock update, 34% reduction in MP3 playback, 13% reduction in voice query over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth).
The Snapdragon Wear 3100 is based on a new ultra-low power hierarchical system architecture approach. The Architecture includes up to 1.2GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor coupled with QCC1110 co-processor which is designed from scratch.
The co-processor is designed to support enhanced ambient, dedicated sports, traditional watch modes, Works alone or in conjunction within main processor. It has a small footprint of 21mm2, where its Cortex MO processor runs at near threshold voltages. It has dedicated PMU, deep learning engine, custom designed SRAM, range of I/Os etc.
The Snapdragon Wear 3100 features in Adreno 304 GPU specially optimized for wearables and supports OpenGL ES 3.0. The SoC also supports 400MHz LPDDR3 memory, eMMC 4.5 storage and other configs between 4×4 and 8×8.
The Chipset can easily handle display s with up to 640 x 480 pixels resolution (at 60fps) and also brings MIPI and SPI support. Qualcomm has managed to include Snapdragon X5 LTE model which handles speeds of up to 1Gbps download and 150Mbps upload.
The Wear 3100 also comes with support for Gen 8C satellite like GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo, along with Terrestrial tracking using Wi-Fi, Cellular and PDR 3.0 (GPS + Sensor fusion). It has WCN3620 low power Wi-Fi and Bluetooth , which is optimized for wearables. It supports 802.11 b/g/n (2.4GHz single band), Bluetooth V4.1 + BLE, USB 3.0, integrated NFC with support for NXP and Qualcomm location tracking.
Apart from that, it also includes Qualcomm Voice Suite, Qualcomm Voice Activation, Qualcomm Noise / Echo cancellation, Qualcomm Aqstic audio codec and speaker amplifier.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 (SDW3100) Platform has already entered in to mass production. Qualcomm is working with Fossil Group, Louis Vuitton and Montblanc to roll out wearables powered by Wear 3100 SOC.