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Qualcomm’s reputation has been damaged in recent weeks. In mid-May, the company had to deal with news that Google was rebuilding Wear OS with a new partner – Samsung. As recently as yesterday, Google confirmed that its upcoming Pixel 6 series will ship with the company’s own silicon rather than Qualcomm’s. After Google’s partnership with Samsung broke, Qualcomm later confirmed that it still plans to make new portable chips. Immediately after Google’s Pixel 6 announced, the company issued a statement stating that it “will continue to work closely with Google on existing and future products based on the Snapdragon platforms.” While Qualcomm hasn’t developed further on its future plans, we’ve spotted code for a new Wear OS chipset made by Qualcomm that could end up being the Snapdragon Wear 5100.
Last week, Qualcomm uploaded new code to its Aurora Code forum with the build ID “LAW.UM.2.0-00700-SW5100.0” and the code name “monaco”. “LAW” stands for “Linux Android Wear” (Android Wear was the old name for Wear OS), while “UM” may mean “Unified Modem”. We assume that “SW5100” is the abbreviation for the marketing name of this platform, which could be the Snapdragon Wear 5100.
While digging into the code, we found out that the platform is currently under development on the Linux 5.4 kernel, but there is conflicting information about which version of Android the platform is based on. The CAF versions page lists the version as Android 11, but the shipping API level in a config file is listed as “29” which is Android 10. If the platform is actually based on Android 11 we still don’t know if it has any of the changes introduced in the big Wear OS 3 update. Smartwatches running Qualcomm’s existing Snapdragon Wear 4100 platform will receive the Wear OS 3 update, we don’t. So let’s see no reason why this platform won’t perform as well if it is indeed the Snapdragon Wear 5100.
By analyzing the card’s commit history and configuration files, we determined that the “monaco” chipset is based on Qualcomm’s existing “bengal” platform. “Bengal” is the code name for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 662 and 460 platforms, two 11nm chipsets with four ARM Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores. “Monaco,” however, appears to have a quad-core processor with ARM Cortex-A73 cores, a slight upgrade from the ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core configuration of the Snapdragon Wear 4100.
We don’t have more details to share about this new wearable platform, but we did spot an interesting reference to “Atherton” wearables in the code. This code name could refer to benchmark devices powered by this new platform, or it could be something else entirely. We have asked Qualcomm to comment on this story and will update this article if we have any news.
Featured Image: Mobvoi’s TicWatch Pro 3 GPS powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100 chip
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