Snapdragon Wear Elite arrives with on-device AI capabilities, performance and battery gains

Qualcomm’s latest system on a chip for wrist wearables is here, and it jumps on the Elite naming scheme with more power and on-device AI capabilities for the agentic AI era. It’s set to power the next-generation of flagship WearOS smartwatches as well as upcoming AI wearables like pins and pendants with added support for Android and Linux.

From a performance standpoint, Qualcomm claims the Wear Elite brings 5x CPU performance, up to 7x GPU improvement and 30% longer battery life when compared with the outgoing Snapdragon W5+ Gen 2 platform. Wear Elite is fabbed on a 3nm architecture and brings a five-core CPU with 1 prime core @2.1GHz and 4 performance cores @ 1.9GHz alongside a dedicated co-processor.

This is Qualcomm’s first Wear series platform with a dedicated Hexagon NPU designed for agentic AI assistants rated at 12 TOPS of performance and with support for 2B parameter models.

On the connectivity side, Qualcomm is bringing 5G reduced capability (RedCap) support for low latency and extended battery life. The chip also features support for NB-NTN (Narrowband Non-Terrestrial Networks) in areas without cellular connectivity as well as Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 6.0, NFC, UWB and dual band GNSS positioning.

While Qualcomm provides all of the abovementioned connectivity standards with the Snapdragon Wear Elite, device manufacturers will be able to source versions of the SoC with specific features removed.

There’s fast charging on board too, with Qualcomm claiming devices with the new SoC can achieve a 50% charge in under 10 minutes.

The first Snapdragon Wear Elite devices are expected in the “coming months” with OEMs like Samsung, Google and Motorola already on board to offer Snapdragon Wear Elite devices.

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