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

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 is set to power the next-generation 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 that the Wear Elite brings 5x CPU performance, 7x GPU improvement, and 30% longer battery life compared to the outgoing Snapdragon W5+ Gen 2 platform. The Wear Elite is based on 3nm architecture and brings a five-core CPU with 1 prime core @2.1GHz and 4 performance cores @1.9GHz with a dedicated co-processor.

It is Qualcomm’s first Wear Series platform with a dedicated Hexagon NPU designed for agentic AI assistants rated at 12 TOPS performance and with support for the 2B parameter model.

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

While Qualcomm offers all of the above connectivity standards with the Snapdragon Wear Elite, device makers will be able to get versions of the SoC with specific features removed.

There is also fast charging on board, with Qualcomm claiming that devices with the new SoC can achieve a 50% charge in less than 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 introduce Snapdragon Wear Elite devices.

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