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  • nandnandnand - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    "This was a rather unfortunate for" -> "This was rather unfortunate for"
    "Qualcomm sees to fix this"???
    "as ARM announce the" -> "as ARM announced the"
  • psychobriggsy - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    Meh, only X5 LTE. Not interested unless it's X16. My watch needs 1Gbps.
  • littlebitstrouds - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    Trolololololz
  • appleache - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    I need a57 on my wrist for the winter.
  • zodiacsoulmate - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link

    only quad core... i need at least 8 of them to power my wrist
  • ToTTenTranz - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    If they went with ARMv7, why not opt for the Cortex A5 instead?
  • extide - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    Yeah, exactly. A7 = space optimized, A5 = power optimized and most efficient A series core. Although, I am not sure if A5 supports SMP. Plus, they really only need one maybe 2 cores. I would say 2 would be perfect. Quad cores in a WATCH! Geez!
  • DanNeely - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    Googling turned up a handful of references to multi-core Cortex-A5 chips.

    I suspect going with A7s either had to do with more familiarity (lower upfront costs from more design reuse); possibly combined with the A5 not having enough performance to keep the UI fluid.
  • alex010203 - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link

    Interesting. http://www.import-express.com/cbtprogram/apa/Elect...
  • ToTTenTranz - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    Qualcomm themselves have dual and quad-core Cortex A5 SoCs. MSM8225 and MSM8225Q for example.
  • extide - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    Ah, ok, so it is.
  • r3loaded - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    A35 is where it's at. Faster than an A7, less power and smaller area than an A5, and it's ARMv8-A!
  • extide - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    Yeah, 2 A35's on 14nm, with a minimal GPU, and built in wifi/bt/LTE would be great.
  • jjj - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    "to date only Samsung (Exynos 3250) and Apple (S1) were able to employ chipsets that were specifically designed for wearables"

    That's a ridiculous claim,lots of others are out there for wearables in general and even for watches in particular. Ofc Google is being nasty and insists in keeping Wear irrelevant.
    Here LTE is not a real advantage since too few can afford a connection.
    DDR3 shows that Qualcomm decided to spend little on this, the cost of DDR4 isn't an issue anymore as it will reach parity soon.Would have allowed for some extra power savings.
  • boostern - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    Did they said anything about the process node? 28nm, 20nm or 14nm?
  • Laxaa - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    Wouldn't be surprised if it was still 28.
  • Shadow7037932 - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    "SoCs such as Snapdragon SoCs such as the Snapdragon 400 (Motorolla Moto 360 2nd gen)."

    Seriously....????
  • randomhkkid - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    So this is basically a snapdragon 400 with a chipset specific to android wear? Same quad core 1.2ghz A7 and same Adreno 304 GPU
  • appleache - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    I still don't know why smart watch would need quad core, wasn't all the animation should be handle by gpu acceleration by now ? Or Android still need cpu to do those job....
  • Darkknight512 - Monday, May 30, 2016 - link

    If cores are put to sleep aggressively 4 cores at 400 Mhz will use less power then a single core at 1.6 Ghz when utilized for the same amount of time.
  • LordConrad - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    I think I would rather have an underclocked Snapdragon 425 in my next Smart Watch. Maybe drop the 425 down to 1GHz, this should be plenty fast for wearables.
  • Kalelovil - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link

    Is this a new SoC or just a rebadging of the Snapdragon 210 with lowered clocks?
    https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/proce...
    (It would explains odd choices for a wearable such as the quad core CPU)
  • mforce - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link

    Quad core does make sense because A7 cores are really small silicon wise so 2 extra ones don't take up much more space on the chips and if needed cores can just be shut down or put into really low power mode.

    It's better to have more cores running in low power mode ( at a low frequency ) than to have less ( 2 or one ) running at full speed and having to switch through tasks more often. While you might only be using one app keep in mind that Android has many background threads that need to run.

    So from a power perspective quad core does make sens and yes there's also the marketing, it just sounds better.

    Btw the Blocks watch will be using this SOC, as a backer that ordered one I'm looking forward to it.

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