Qualcomm and Google announced that they have agreed to expand their partnership to develop the Snapdragon Wear platform based on the open source RISC-V processor architecture (ISA) – designed for the next generation of Wear OS products.
This announcement from the two technology giants means that Qualcomm will work on developing hardware for wearable devices based on RISC-V, while Google will work on developing software for these applications.
The two companies will jointly develop the RISC-V platform for mobile devices. Initially, the focus will be on smartwatches, perhaps with more advanced hardware in the near future. This announcement is a milestone because it presents a proprietary solution based on Qualcomm's RISC-V that will completely solve the problems of Google's Wear OS.
“Qualcomm is a pillar of the Wear OS ecosystem, providing high-performance, low-power systems to many of our OEM partners,” said Bjorn Kilburn, general manager of Wear OS at Google. We are pleased to partner with Qualcomm and offer RISC-V solutions. “Wearables are coming to the market.”
“We are excited to leverage RISC-V and expand our Snapdragon Wear platform to become the leading silicon provider for the Wear OS platform,” said Dino Bekes, vice president and general manager of wearables at Qualcomm. It grows. “Rapidly evolve Wear OS while encouraging adoption of new devices.”
In addition to the processor that provides computing power to the entire device, it also contains various supporting features such as memory and sensors. All of these are typically based on ISA cores developed by Arm, including Cortex-A series cores for PCs and Cortex-M series cores for microcontrollers.
Since all of these cores are expensive, replacing them with a RISC-V architecture will reduce or eliminate Arm's licensing fees, but we don't currently know if the RISC-V-based Snapdragon Wear platform will replace them all. ARM cores or if that makes it easy. Replace selected cores.