Qualcomm promised some big news in smartwatch chips, and the Snapdragon Wear 3100 is just that. Bringing a long-awaited update to the company's wearable-focused silicon, the new platform promises to be more powerful and more power-efficient, with a number of big names in smartwatches already signed on.
If you think you haven’t heard anything about AMD’s Athlon brand in a long while, you’re probably not alone. Once the premiere line of AMD processors, the Athlon has taken a step back and practically disappeared, especially with the introduction of the new Zen CPU architecture and the Ryzen processors. AMD, however, isn’t done with the brand yet and is pushing it back into the spotlight with the Athlon 200GE, its first Athlon to use Zen cores and an integrated Radeon Vega GPU.
Today Intel revealed the 8th Gen Core m3, Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 mobile processors. This release includes both the U-series (Whiskey Lake) and the Y-series (Amber Lake) primarily made for thin and light laptops and 2 in 1 form factors. This generation supports up to 4 cores in a 15W envelope with gigabit wi-fi via integrated Intel WIreless-AC 160 MHZ hardware. Inside this architecture is support for USB 3.1, dedicated quad-core audio DSP, and a whole batch of other features included in a variety of potential final products.
The Internet of Things or IoT is one of the fastest growing segments in the tech market today. For the most part, this market is made up of stationary devices that communicate with each other over short distances. This has practically limited IoT products to houses or rooms within a building. Samsung, however, proposes a future where IoT devices can cover distances as far as 10 km without using much power. Naturally, it’s proposing its shiny new Exynos i S111 system-on-chip to power that future.
Qualcomm will shift to a new 7nm system-on-chip design for its next, 5G-capable flagship mobile platform, though the company isn't quite ready to spill the beans completely on what it has planned. The new SoC - which Qualcomm says it expects to be the first 5G-capable mobile platform for premium-tier smartphones and more - is currently sampling to device partners.
Although the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 has yet to ship to owners, Huawei is already making sure that consumers know that this is no upgrade. It is trying to play on the phablet’s lack of fancy new features, like triple cameras or a new processor. A ground-breaking upgrade is still coming, it implies, and it won’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that it’s talking about the upcoming Huawei Mate 20. While it probably won’t add a fourth camera to its back, Huawei is going to put the focus, no pun intended, on the Kirin 980, which it will boast to be a world’s first system-on-chip.
Arm is laying down the gauntlet to Intel, revealing a roadmap of chips that it thinks can oust the Core i5 from your laptop. The chip designer is best known for its mobile CPUs, the architecture of which dominates the smartphone chip world. However, Arm also has ambitions to be a player in larger devices.
While the idea definitely had lots of appeal, Microsoft’s Windows 10 on ARM, specifically on Snapdragon, fell flat on its face during its first generation. It was largely attributed to performance problems which was, in turn, attributed to the not-so-recent Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 used in that first batch. Back in June, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 850 that would fix that mistake. Benchmark sightings, however, aren’t exactly encouraging.
Just because Intel has yet again delayed its 10 nm silicon to 2020, if all goes well, that doesn’t mean fans of the processors won’t have anything to look forward to this year. And, no, they don’t have to wait for the still to be revealed Cascade Lake processors. As early as October, Intel is expected to announce its 9th gen Core lineup, still on the 14 nm Coffee Lake architecture, that will be bringing, for the first time, 8 cores to the mainstream market.
It’s not a good year for Intel. Never mind AMD’s comeback, Intel’s 2018 kicked off with its biggest embarrassments to date: Meltdown and Spectre. And then it had to admit that the long-overdue 10nm processors will have to wait until 2019. At its Data-centric Innovation Summit, however, the silicon maker is now saying that those won’t actually be coming until 2020, with a “half step” coming in 2019 instead.
Mid-range, or as Qualcomm would call them “high-end”, smartphones are killing it. While majority of media coverage is lavished on premium smartphones with premium prices and eccentric designs, devices on the middle tiers continue to offer better bang for buck value when it comes to balancing performance, battery life, and price. That’s why it’s no surprise that Qualcomm continues to saturate the market with chips on this range, like the newly announced Snapdragon 670, that is going to give OEMs a headache in trying picking out a chip for their next-gen phones.
It’s probably a bad time to launch a new smartwatch these next few weeks, unless you’re Samsung or Apple. That’s because any smartwatch you put into the market will be running on a mobile platform that is effectively two years old. Even older if you consider that the Snapdragon Wear 2100 is based on a modified Snapdragon 400 chipset. And in about 30 days, that wearable processor will be rendered obsolete now that Qualcomm itself is teasing when the long-overdue successor, tentatively known as the Snapdragon Wear 3100, will be unveiled.