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Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 3100 Smartwatch Chip Promises Up To 2 Days of Battery Life (venturebeat.com)
Qualcomm has unveiled the long-awaited successor to its Snapdragon Wear 2100 smartwatch chipset, the Snapdragon Wear 3100. The new high-end chipset is "based on a brand-new architecture Qualcomm claims is the most efficient it's ever created, optimized for wearables-specific use cases like step tracking, heart rate monitoring, and always-on connectivity," reports VentureBeat. From the report: [T]he company's engineers stuffed the Snapdragon Wear 3100 with a four A7 cores and two secondary chips -- a digital signal processor (DSP) and an ultra-low power coprocessor (QCC1110) -- in what Qualcomm calls a "big-small-tiny" arrangement. The "big" A7 cores handle intensive, complex tasks like switching between apps, while the "small" and "tiny" DSP and coprocessor perform sensor fusion and other background chores. The way Pankaj Kedia, senior director and business lead at Qualcomm's Smart Wearable division, tells it, the coprocessor -- a diminutive 5.2mm x 4mm chip that's the product of more than five years of research -- is the inarguable showrunner. It taps a Qualcomm-designed memory module that draws a mere 0.6 volts of power, and it's altogether 20 times more power-efficient than the A7 cores.
It's principally meant for light workloads like listening for the wake phrases that precede voice commands ("OK, Google"), streaming music in the background, and updating digital watch faces. However, it's designed to be extensible -- OEMs can tap the coprocessor for real-time sleep and activity monitoring, for example, or for heart rate tracking. The coprocessor -- along with the DSP and A7 cores -- drive three smartwatch operating modes intended to boost battery life. Enhanced ambient mode displays a basic watch face UI in up to 16 colors, with a smoothly animated second hand, live complications, and ambient brightness. Traditional watch mode dispenses with those bells and whistles in favor of a basic analog watch face. Dedicated sports mode -- which isn't available at launch, but will arrive later with sports OEMs, Kedia said -- enables core features like heart rate and GPS tracking, but nothing else. When compared to the Wear 2100, the Wear 3100 offers significantly improved battery life. Here's a comparison (from Qualcomm) of the Wear 3100 and Wear 2100's power consumption:
-Lowest power mode: 67 percent lower
-GPS and location batching: 49 percent lower
-Keyword detection: 43 percent lower
-Clock update once per minute: 35 percent lower
-MP3 playback: 34 percent lower
-Voice queries over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi: 13 percent lower
"The translates to gains of about four to twelve hours in practice (depending on the form factor), or between a day and a half to two days of battery life," reports VentureBeat. "In traditional watch mode, Wear 3100 devices can last up to a week on a charge with 20 percent battery (or up to 30 days with full battery), according to Qualcomm, or 15 hours in dedicated sports mode (with a 450mAh battery)." Some other features include a new more-accepted NFC chip, an improved 4G LTE modem, and a new power management system to improve the efficiency of charging. We can expect the 3100 to appear in smartwatches "this holiday season."
It's principally meant for light workloads like listening for the wake phrases that precede voice commands ("OK, Google"), streaming music in the background, and updating digital watch faces. However, it's designed to be extensible -- OEMs can tap the coprocessor for real-time sleep and activity monitoring, for example, or for heart rate tracking. The coprocessor -- along with the DSP and A7 cores -- drive three smartwatch operating modes intended to boost battery life. Enhanced ambient mode displays a basic watch face UI in up to 16 colors, with a smoothly animated second hand, live complications, and ambient brightness. Traditional watch mode dispenses with those bells and whistles in favor of a basic analog watch face. Dedicated sports mode -- which isn't available at launch, but will arrive later with sports OEMs, Kedia said -- enables core features like heart rate and GPS tracking, but nothing else. When compared to the Wear 2100, the Wear 3100 offers significantly improved battery life. Here's a comparison (from Qualcomm) of the Wear 3100 and Wear 2100's power consumption:
-Lowest power mode: 67 percent lower
-GPS and location batching: 49 percent lower
-Keyword detection: 43 percent lower
-Clock update once per minute: 35 percent lower
-MP3 playback: 34 percent lower
-Voice queries over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi: 13 percent lower
"The translates to gains of about four to twelve hours in practice (depending on the form factor), or between a day and a half to two days of battery life," reports VentureBeat. "In traditional watch mode, Wear 3100 devices can last up to a week on a charge with 20 percent battery (or up to 30 days with full battery), according to Qualcomm, or 15 hours in dedicated sports mode (with a 450mAh battery)." Some other features include a new more-accepted NFC chip, an improved 4G LTE modem, and a new power management system to improve the efficiency of charging. We can expect the 3100 to appear in smartwatches "this holiday season."
They're not for smart people, let's face it.
My 1980's Casio can run 20 years on one battery,
Not progress.
Still not good enough.
Golly gee! Seriously though, the day my Time Steel dies will be a dark day. I'm not currently planning on replacing it with anything on the market, and I'll miss it to death.
RIP Pebble. You were getting there.
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
So basically this is a watch that forces you to recharge every day (until the battery degrades),
that can't keep accurate time for longer than a minute (unless it synchronizes),
that tracks your location and listens to your voice under programmatic control,
and that plays back music over headphones with batteries that don't even last as long as the watch.
Oooo. Who wouldn't want one of those?
Our shiny useless wrist-brick can now last twice as long! Yay!
My Timex has to be wound EVERY DAY! Takes a licking but come on, one day?
Hopefully this will allow long term wearables for medical diagnostics to be more common and affordable.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) states that 80% of Slashdot readers like 20% of Slashdot stories. The lesser known Double Inverse Pareto suggests that 80% of Slashdot stories interest nobody worth bothering with. Proof of the Pareto principle has been hard to come by. Researchers who worked through hundreds of Slashdot articles and comments have been found to suffer from PTSD, and many committed suicide.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I just don't want a tiny phone on my wrist. Not everything needs to be connected.
0.6 volts of power? This isn't even pedantic, it's just plain wrong.
It pulls just 0.6 volts of power! I bet it also has 12 mA of lumens on the screen, thanks the embedded flux capacitor of 42 Ohms of impedance!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Alert! Sarcasm Malfunction! Alert! Alert ,,,"Ohms of impedance"...
the ohm IS a unit of impedance!
"Impedance is a complex number, with the same units as resistance, for which the SI unit is the ohm ()"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_impedance
Inappropriate correctness in the process of sarcasm will not be tolerated! T'ro dis guy oudda here!
=8-)>
2 days? And that's supposed to be headline news? OK, I won't start my "get off my lawn" and tell you that my 1988 Casio Cosmo Phase watch, complete with a solar system simulator (data from 1901 to 2200) usually lasts about 3 years per battery. I recently started wearing a Xiaomi Mi Band 2 and I quite like it - it vibrates for alarms, calls, notifications, shows Caller ID, notification icons etc and its battery lasts 3 weeks. Not to mention it costs $15! I have ordered the Mi Band 3 so that I can read messages as well (and also read during the day - the screen brightness was the weakness of the Band 2) - which also lasts over 2 weeks before you have to recharge it (and is $25). My phone lasts 2 days, my watch should last much, much longer, unless it does not require me to remove it from my wrist.
Flux - in an electrical world, that usually refers to magnetic flux, measured in Webers or Henries, and a capacitor is measured in Farads. So having a Flux Capacitor (an inductive capacitor) measured in Ohms (resistance) is really the ultimate Geek Component.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I'll be able to do nothing useful that much faster.
I get two years of battery life out of my watch. And it's waterproof. And it doesn't have all that unnecessary bloat getting in the way of seeing the time.
What a stupid product.
Why didn't you make the meeting?
Didn't you think that meeting was important?
Do you value your job here?
Did you ever consider that your job should have come before wearing a gadget?
Is this box big enough for you things?
Can you close the door on your way out?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
45-day battery life....
and that's even with some 24/7 functions running. So yeah, make your way off the front page please. You're beat.
With all the features, you can as well make a phone out of that chip or similar.
I looked the chip up and the max screen resolution is 640x480, so a bit limited for that ; no word on maximum memory capacity.
It's a pretty major spec : 0.5GB, 1GB, 2GB?
I think 480p super tall would work well on a smaller smartphone (18:9), else if you don't mind it a bit weird I could see something like 640x320 screen if you were to use a straight up watch SoC.
Smartphones are not only big, they're heavy. A modern dumbphone weighs in at ~70 grams. You will be lucky if a smartphone weighs twice that. I would like it low power, small, plastic body etc. and to get down to or under 100 grams (while keeping a 3.5mm jack). This means a smaller battery too. Imagine going down to even 900 mAh then the thing would be able to use a removable dumbphone battery and that would fill up rather quick over USB 1A if the battery can take it.
Besides, a 1980's Casio watch can't do: notifications, remote control, internet searches, heart rate, step counter, send text messages, take notes, show weather and news, reminders, monitor sleep, voice-to-text...
On the other hand, it can still tell you the time more than 2 hours after you've unplugged it, and I've kind of read somewhere that this was supposed to be the main purpose of a watch.
I've already have a device for all the rest, it's my smartphone.
(And I've only switched to smartphone once PDA stopped being a thing. Before that I preferred putting the smart functions in a separate device, and have a phone that can make phone calls, even if your PDA's battery is flat.... after one week of use).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Any geek could have told you that a flux capacitor enables time-travel.
The subject says it all- i miss Pebble. I last charged the one on my wrist 6 days ago and it still has 30%
-whoa, I'm jones'ing for a sig right about now...