Qualcomm Partners with Google to Launch a First-Class RISC-V Platform for Wear OS Wearables
Two months after announcing a RISC-V joint venture, Qualcomm looks to make the architecture the go-to for performance wearables.
Qualcomm has announced a partnership with Google which will see the company developing a new wearables platform built around the free and open source RISC-V architecture, dubbed under its Snapdragon Wear brand and using Google's Wear OS software.
"We are excited to leverage RISC-V and expand our Snapdragon Wear platform as a leading silicon provider for Wear OS," says Dino Bekis, vice president and general manager for Qualcomm's Wearables and Mixed Signals Solutions division. "Our Snapdragon Wear platform innovations will help the Wear OS ecosystem rapidly evolve and streamline new device launches."
The announcement represents a move away from Qualcomm's usual Arm IP for its processor cores, but not one that arrives out of the blue: in August Qualcomm announced a joint venture with Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP Semiconductors to form a new venture focusing exclusively on RISC-V — the free and open source instruction set architecture designed to scale from ultra-low-power microcontroller cores all the way up to high-performance computing (HPC).
In this case, Qualcomm's going to be looking more at the energy-efficient end of the spectrum — but given it's partnering with Google to ensure the company's Wear OS software will run on the RISC-V Snapdragon Wear, it will be using application-class processors with plenty of compute performance. It has not yet, however, released technical details for the upcoming parts.
"Qualcomm Technologies have been a pillar of the Wear OS ecosystem, providing high performance, low power systems for many of our OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer] partners,” said Bjorn Kilburn, Google's general manager for Wear OS. "We are excited to extend our work with Qualcomm Technologies and bring a RISC-V wearable solution to market."
Qualcomm claims the expanded Snapdragon Wear platform will reduce OEMs' time to market when developing smartwatches with custom cores and lower power draw than current offerings, but has not yet announced when the first products built around the platform will be available to end users.