Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon Wear Elite Platform

Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon Wear Elite platform on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, introducing a premium processor designed to power next-generation Wear OS smartwatches and AI-enabled wearables such as smart glasses and pins.

The new chip marks a significant upgrade over the Snapdragon W5 Gen 2, which Qualcomm now positions as a high-end but entry-level option in its wearable lineup. Built on a 3nm manufacturing process, the Snapdragon Wear Elite features a big.LITTLE CPU architecture for the first time in wearables: one high-performance core running at 2.1 GHz paired with four efficiency cores at 1.95 GHz. Officials from the company stated that this configuration delivers up to five times the single-core performance of its predecessor, enabling faster app launches, multitasking, and boot times. The integrated Adreno GPU provides up to seven times the graphics performance, supporting smooth rendering at 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second.

A key emphasis of the platform is on-device artificial intelligence, powered by a dedicated Hexagon NPU capable of processing models with up to two billion parameters and generating up to 10 tokens per second. This...