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As much as I love Qualcomm and their mobile chipsets, one of the biggest issues Android WearOS has faced is the truly shocking chipsets available to it.

We are currently only just seeing watches feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 3100, which launched last year and is based on the SD425 chipset that launched in 2016 that was based on the massive 29nm fabrication process (in comparison to the 7nm of the SD855+).

In fact, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 3100 was almost identical to the chipset it replaced from the year before, the Snapdragon Wear 3100, the only inclusion was the Cortex M0 coprocessor which is an ultra low powered processor used for background processes which should have saved a lot of battery life. In reality, WearOS devices still barely get a day of life and this is likely why companies have been reluctant to adopt the newer chipset.

In comparison, Samsung have been embarrassing Qualcomm with their Exynos 9110 which launched in August 2018. This chipset is built on the 10nm fabrication process and uses the superior Cortex-A53 CPU, the only downside is that their chipset has 2 cores vs 4 of Qualcomm.

XDA-Developers have identified new information about the up and coming Qualcomm Snapdragon 3300 via a code commit which indicates Qualcomm have finally pulled their finger out. The new Snapdragon Wear 3300 chipset will be based on the Snapdragon 429 processor which debuted in 2018, so it will be two years out of date by launch, but it reduces the fabrication process down from 28nm to 12nm,

The SD429 is a quad-core chipset, so I would assume the same for the Wear 3300, and it uses the Adreno 504 which should provide a massive improvement in performance. The SD429 is clocked at 1.95GHz but I would expect the Wear 3300 to be more like 1.2Ghz similar to other wearable chipsets.

Not much else is know about the chipset, but it should bring the Qualcomm option in line with Samsung and hopefully we will finally see a semi-decent battery life from a WearOS watch.

Snapdragon Wear
4100+
Snapdragon Wear 3100Snapdragon Wear 2100Exynos 9110
First announcedJune 2020September 20181st February 2016August 9, 2018 
Fabrication Process12nm28nm28nm10 nm (0.01 μm, 1.0e-5 mm) 
Core count444
Clock Speed1.7 1.2 GHz 1.2 GHz1.15 GHz
Core nameARM Cortex A53ARM Cortex A7ARM Cortex A7Cortex-A53 
CPU Architecture 64 bit32-bit32-bit 64 bit
Integrated gpuAdreno 504
@750Mhz
Adreno 304 GPU
@400Mhz
Adreno 304 GPUMali-T720  MP1?
CoprocessorEnhanced QCC1110
Cortex M0
QCC1110
Cortex M0
NoNo
RAMLPDDR3 750MhzLPDDR3 400Mhz
IsaARMv7-AARMv7-AARMv7-AARMv8.2 
802.11b/g/n802.11b/g/n802.11n Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n
Bluetooth 5,Bluetooth 4.1Bluetooth 4.1Bluetooth 4.2
CellularX5 2G/3G/LTE (Cat 4, up to 150/50 Mbit/s)X5 2G/3G/LTE (Cat 4, up to 150/50 Mbit/s)X5 2G/3G/LTE (Cat 4, up to 150/50 Mbit/s)3G/LTE

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