Qualcomm Announces RISC-V Chip For Wear OS Smartwatches

Qualcomm has finally decided to bet on the future of RISC-V with an industry-wide alliance. The chipmaker is now bringing its first chip based on the open-source architecture to the mass market. According to the latest reports, the American chipmaker will join Google to create a new hardware platform for the Wear OS system.

Qualcomm To Bring A New Type Of Chip For Wear OS Smartwatches

Qualcomm recently announced an “extended” collaboration with Google in the wearable business. The company aims to develop a “RISC-V Snapdragon Wear” platform for the next generation of Wear OS products. Reports claim that RISC-V-based wearable solutions will enjoy a global launch at a later date. Qualcomm is tipped to be the leading “silicon provider” for Wear OS smartwatches. The chipmaker also underscored the open-source nature of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) in its announcement. According to the company, it will provide chip manufacturers and designers with the ability to develop completely custom computing cores. No doubt, it would be quite helpful for other companies to enter the market.

Qualcomm says:

“The RISC-V technology is open, flexible, and scalable. It can benefit the entire value chain that goes from silicon vendors to OEM manufacturers, end devices, and ultimately consumers.”

According to Wear OS general manager Bjorn Kilburn, Qualcomm technologies have been a “pillar” of the Wear OS ecosystem so far. The search giant, Google is also preparing to extend its partnership with the company to bring a RISC-V wearable solution to the market. Google is working quite hard to turn the open-source ISA into a “tier 1 platform” for Android. However, it must be ensured that low-level components of the Android OS work well on RISC-V chips. Moreover, app support also needs to be easier to achieve as they are mostly written in Java or Java-interoperable Kotlin programming language.

Sources claim that Qualcomm is investing a lot of money and effort to turn RISC-V into a successful chip technology. The chipmaker also announced an alliance with other leading technology companies to foster RISC-V adoption. It is pertinent to mention here that the newly introduced initiative for Wear OS devices will likely be the first, true debut of the ISA in the mass market of Android devices. RISC-V also aims to provide Qualcomm, Google, and other mobile-related companies with a real alternative to Arm architectures.

Qualcomm and Google’s collaboration on the RISC-V Wear OS platform promises a new horizon for wearables. The outcome seems nebulous due to Google’s ongoing efforts to fully integrate RISC-V into AOSP, Qualcomm’s broader strategy, and ARM’s changing business dynamics.