New Snapdragon Wear 5100 leak points to another iterative upgrade for Qualcomm's wearable SoCs

The Snapdragon Wear 5100 may not offer the big performance improvement that past leaks have suggested. Last month, XDA Developers revealed that the Wear 5100 would feature ARM Cortex-A73 cores, an upgrade on the Cortex-A53 ones in the Wear 4100 and Wear 4100 Plus. The website discovered this information in Qualcomm's Code Aurora Forum, which appeared to state that the Wear 5100 utilises the same platform as the Snapdragon 460 and Snapdragon 662, SoCs that have Cortex-A73 cores.

However, Roland Quandt and WinFuture think otherwise. Apparently, Qualcomm is testing Wear 5100 samples with only Cortex-A53 cores, the same configuration as the Wear 4100 and Wear 4100 Plus. The Wear 5100 has four CPU cores too, matching its predecessors, although clock speeds remain unknown at this time. We doubt that Qualcomm will overclock these Cortex-A53 cores massively, though. The company caps Cortex-A53 cores at 1.8 GHz in the Snapdragon 662, 100 MHz higher than in the Wear 4100 and Wear 4100 Plus.

Performance improvements could come in other areas, such as with LPDDR4x RAM, a faster option than the LPDDR3 that Qualcomm has used in its Wear SoCs since the Wear 2100. Additionally, WinFuture believes that the Wear 5100 has an ultra-low-power co-processor, another feature that the SoC shares with the Wear 4100 Plus. Supposedly, up to 2 GB of RAM could be available to the Wear 5100, 512 MB more than the Galaxy Watch4 series has.

WinFuture adds that Samsung is fabricating Wear 5100 SoCs, albeit without disclosing which node the company is using. Ultimately, the Wear 5100 may be to the Wear 4100 Plus as the Wear 3100 was to the Wear 2100, a slight performance bump aided by RAM improvements. A release date for the Wear 5100 has not leaked yet either, so the SoC may be a few months away from launching.

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