Qualcomm launches Snapdragon Wear 4100 processor for future smartwatches

Qualcomm on Wednesday announced the launch of a new chipset for wearables. Called Snapdragon Wear 4100 platforms, the chipset is aimed at the future smartwatches. The company claims the new platform brings better performance, new smart features, and power efficiency.

Qualcomm's new processor is based on its hybrid design and comes with a smarter Always On co-processor. The company has also made an improvement to the power based on 12nm process technology. The improvements are said to bring better sports, ambient and watch modes.

According to the company, the new chip delivers up to 85% higher performance than the predecessor, Snapdragon 3100 chip.

“The AON Co-processor now supports up to 64K colors and extends offload experiences to include continuous heart rate monitoring, faster tilt-to-wake responsiveness, steps, alarms, timers, and haptics,” Qualcomm said on its website.

In terms of specifications, Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100 has a clock speed up to 1.7GHz with ARM Cortex A53 and quad-core setup. It has Qualcomm Hexagon QDSP6 V56 DSP technology. It also features integrated X5 LTE Global Mode modem. For graphics, it has Adreno 504 GPU.

Connectivity options on the chipset include Bluetooth 5.0, Bluetooth 4.0, LTE TDD and LTE FDD, TD-SCDMA, EV-DO, GSM/EDGE, and Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n. It also supports Cellular and Wi-Fi, Beidou, Galileo, GLONASS, and GPS.

Other important features of the chipset are USB 2.0 support, 1080p video recording capability, and eMMC 4.5. It supports Wear OS by Google for software.