Qualcomm is relying on RISC-V instead of ARM processor technology in another system-on-chip category: wearables. Without revealing any further details, Qualcomm announced a cooperation with Google in the run-up to the Snapdragon Summit 2023. The goal is a “RISC-V based wearable platform for Google’s Wear OS”.
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Qualcomm’s dry press release doesn’t even roughly reveal when the first RISC-V Snapdragon wearable platform will appear. However, Qualcomm emphasizes that it has already joined two other projects to promote RISC-V technology: RISE for more RISC-V software and an alliance for automotive chips with RISC-V.
This suggests that Qualcomm is primarily shooting against ARM with the announcement of wearable processors with RISC-V. The two long-standing business partners – Qualcomm is one of the most important ARM customers – continue to wage a court battle over license fees.
RISC-V instead of ARM
The previous “Snapdragon Wear Platforms” contain computing cores from the supplier ARM. The latest “Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 Wearable Platform” was announced in 2022 and is in the brand new Google Pixel Watch 2 with Wear OS 4.0. The Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 has four relatively powerful ARM cores of the 11-year-old Cortex-A53 type.
It remains to be seen whether Qualcomm’s first RISC-V SoCs for wearables will also achieve this performance class. For cheaper devices such as fitness bracelets and GPS trackers, Qualcomm also supplies cheaper and weaker technology such as the Snapdragon 1200 Wearable Platform with ARM Cortex-A7.
Qualcomm is already using at least one RISC-V core in some Snapdragon SoCs for smartphones, but has not yet revealed any details. It probably controls one of the numerous function blocks as an embedded microcontroller.
(ciw)