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September 10, 2018 10:00 pm

Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 3100 Smartwatch Chip Promises Up To 2 Days of Battery Life

Qualcomm has unveiled the long-awaited successor to its Snapdragon Wear 2100 smartwatch chipset, the Snapdragon Wear 3100. The new high-end chipset is "based on a brand-new architecture Qualcomm claims is the most efficient it's ever created, optimized for wearables-specific use cases like step tracking, heart rate monitoring, and always-on connectivity," reports VentureBeat. From the report: [T]he company's engineers stuffed the Snapdragon Wear 3100 with a four A7 cores and two secondary chips -- a digital signal processor (DSP) and an ultra-low power coprocessor (QCC1110) -- in what Qualcomm calls a "big-small-tiny" arrangement. The "big" A7 cores handle intensive, complex tasks like switching between apps, while the "small" and "tiny" DSP and coprocessor perform sensor fusion and other background chores. The way Pankaj Kedia, senior director and business lead at Qualcomm's Smart Wearable division, tells it, the coprocessor -- a diminutive 5.2mm x 4mm chip that's the product of more than five years of research -- is the inarguable showrunner. It taps a Qualcomm-designed memory module that draws a mere 0.6 volts of power, and it's altogether 20 times more power-efficient than the A7 cores. It's principally meant for light workloads like listening for the wake phrases that precede voice commands ("OK, Google"), streaming music in the background, and updating digital watch faces. However, it's designed to be extensible -- OEMs can tap the coprocessor for real-time sleep and activity monitoring, for example, or for heart rate tracking. The coprocessor -- along with the DSP and A7 cores -- drive three smartwatch operating modes intended to boost battery life. Enhanced ambient mode displays a basic watch face UI in up to 16 colors, with a smoothly animated second hand, live complications, and ambient brightness. Traditional watch mode dispenses with those bells and whistles in favor of a basic analog watch face. Dedicated sports mode -- which isn't available at launch, but will arrive later with sports OEMs, Kedia said -- enables core features like heart rate and GPS tracking, but nothing else. When compared to the Wear 2100, the Wear 3100 offers significantly improved battery life. Here's a comparison (from Qualcomm) of the Wear 3100 and Wear 2100's power consumption: -Lowest power mode: 67 percent lower-GPS and location batching: 49 percent lower-Keyword detection: 43 percent lower-Clock update once per minute: 35 percent lower-MP3 playback: 34 percent lower-Voice queries over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi: 13 percent lower "The translates to gains of about four to twelve hours in practice (depending on the form factor), or between a day and a half to two days of battery life," reports VentureBeat. "In traditional watch mode, Wear 3100 devices can last up to a week on a charge with 20 percent battery (or up to 30 days with full battery), according to Qualcomm, or 15 hours in dedicated sports mode (with a 450mAh battery)." Some other features include a new more-accepted NFC chip, an improved 4G LTE modem, and a new power management system to improve the efficiency of charging. We can expect the 3100 to appear in smartwatches "this holiday season."

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