Samsung Galaxy Watch 9 uses Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear Elite

Samsung is set to officially unveil its next-generation smartwatches, the Galaxy Watch 9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra 2, at its Galaxy Unpacked event in London on July 22, 2026. Extensive leaks of promotional materials have confirmed a major strategic shift for the standard model, which will abandon Samsung's own Exynos processors in favor of a new Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear Elite chip.

The clearest evidence comes from images shared by leaker Evan Blass, which include an official slide explicitly labeling the Galaxy Watch 9 as "Powered by Snapdragon Wear Elite." This move ends years of Samsung relying exclusively on its in-house Exynos chipsets for its flagship wearables. Qualcomm first announced the 3-nanometer Snapdragon Wear Elite earlier this year, touting substantial performance and power efficiency gains alongside expanded capacity for on-device artificial intelligence tasks.

Industry reports and the leaked materials suggest the new chip could deliver performance improvements of up to 50 percent and power efficiency gains of up to 30 percent compared to the previous Exynos W1000. A key upgrade is the inclusion of a dedicated Neural Processing Unit, designed to enable advanced AI...