We already knew Qualcomm was one of the “involved” partners in yesterday’s Android Wear announcement, which is a new Android-based platform by Google that will debut for smart watches. We didn’t know the extent of their involvement, though (after all, they do currently sell a smart watch of their own), nor were we sure if they’d be looking to bring the Snapdragon line of chipsets to these new devices.
Thankfully they have cleared a bit of that up, with the chipset vendor stating their intentions to provide Snapdragon-based chipsets for some of these devices. Unfortunately we’re not sure which devices they’ll be powering (so far we know of the Moto 360 and the LG G Watch), nor do we know which exact chipsets will be used.
We imagine Qualcomm won’t be trying to stuff a 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 into any of these things, but a Snapdragon 200 or 400-based chipset could be in order. Nothing’s certain until details are made official, though, so we’ll just have to wait until more details about yesterday’s announcements begin trickling out.
[via Qualcomm]
A very low power Snapdragon needed
I think smartwatches need special chipsets that are low cost low power w/o things like LTE or 720p, There must be new lines of chips
definitely dont need a wrist warmer.
Mean operating temperature: 45° C. Because f%&k the Imperial System.
A Snapdragon 800 wouldn’t be a horrible idea because then you get the low-power language core and always listening, which would be great on a smartwatch. The Snappy 800 is actually REALLY power efficient at idle, which is what the watch will be most of the time, anyway (unless you’re glancing at it constantly).
Probably a better idea would be for Qualcomm to manufacturer a lower clocked (maybe even make it dual-core instead of quad-core) and voltage and cost version of the Snapdragon 800 (but keep the low-power language core), and call it a “Snapdragon 700” or something. Best of both worlds.