Qualcomm Project Aspen surfaces in early leak with details about possible new Snapdragon Wear chipset revealed

The world of smartwatch chipsets moves at a much slower pace than those created for laptop, smartphone and tablet markets. For instance, Samsung has just launched the Galaxy Watch8, Galaxy Watch8 Classic and Galaxy Watch Ultra 2025 (curr. $649.99 on Amazon) with the same Exynos W1000 chipset as last year's models. In a similar fashion, Apple has hardly changed its S series chipsets across multiple generations.

Arguably, Qualcomm takes the most relaxed approach when it comes to producing smartwatch chipsets of those three. To recap, over three years have passed since the company introduced the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 platform, which features four ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.7 GHz with an Adreno 702 GPU built on a 4 nm process. According to Android Authority, Qualcomm is finally preparing a successor, though.

Codenamed Aspen, the project is also referred to as SW6100. Thus at this stage, Android Authority believes that the chipset could eventually arrive as the Snapdragon W6 Gen 1. However, it remains to be seen exactly when at this stage.

Nonetheless, the website reports that Qualcomm is developing SW6100 on an unspecified TSMC node with LPDDR5X RAM, a new QCC6100 coprocessor and the same CPU core clusters as the Exynos W1000. In other words, the SW6100 currently features a single ARM Cortex-A78 CPU core paired with four Cortex-A55 cores. From our benchmarks alone, this CPU core switch should generate almost a 2x performance improvement over the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 using the Exynos W1000 as a baseline. Unfortunately, other details remain unknown for now.