Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 and W5+ Gen 2 as its latest chip for smartwatches.
This comes just over three years after the first generation in July 2022, with the primary upgrade being satellite connectivity. It will allow users to send and receive messages via Narrowband Non-Terrestrial Network (NB-NTN) — starting with Skylo — when there’s no cellular. The intended use case is contacting emergency services when you’re injured in nature or somewhere remote without your phone.
The second change involves improving GPS positioning accuracy by up to 50% thanks to what Qualcomm calls Location Machine Learning 3.0. You should see benefits even in dense urban environments or deep canyons.
Finally, the modem (RF Front End) component — top-right corner below — is about 20% smaller and uses less power. Any size reduction is always helpful for constrained wearables. Qualcomm prominently touts Wear OS support.
Otherwise, the W5 Gen 2 is built on the same 4nm process and has the same cores (4x A53). The ‘+’ model adds a co-processor (22nm M55), with Google just using the regular W5 Gen 2 on the Pixel Watch 4 and adding its own customized solution.
- “We’re excited to have the Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 powering the new Google Pixel Watch 4, delivering high performance, delightful experiences, and potentially life-saving capabilities,” said Sandeep Waraich, Sr. Director, Product Management for Google Wearables. “For smartwatches, performance, efficiency, and connectivity are crucial features that need to work seamlessly in any environment, and this new platform, coupled with Wear OS 6, delivers on all fronts, and to be the first smartwatch to market with emergency satellite communications is a huge leap forward in our suite of safety features.”
The lack of performance upgrades is unfortunate, but is in line with how upgrades are much less frequent compared to phones.
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