RISC-V Snapdragon is to power Google’s Wear OS
Partners Qualcomm and Google are extending their collaboration on wearables based on Google’s OS Wear platform by developing a RISC-V Snapdragon Wear platform to power next generation Wear OS products.
The partners are working together to ensure that applications and a robust software ecosystem for RISC-V will be available for commercial launches. Qualcomm has said that it plans to commercialise the RISC-V based wearables platform worldwide.
The partnership plans to support more products within the ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance. Qualcomm, via its Snapdragon Wear platforms is the leading smartwatch silicon provider for the Wear OS ecosystem.
“Qualcomm Technologies have been a pillar of the Wear OS ecosystem, providing high performance, low power systems for many of our OEM partners,” said Bjorn Kilburn, general manager of Wear OS by Google. “We are excited to extend our work with Qualcomm Technologies and bring a RISC-V wearable solution to market.”
“We are excited to leverage RISC-V and expand our Snapdragon Wear platform . . . Our Snapdragon Wear platform innovations will help the Wear OS ecosystem rapidly evolve and streamline new device launches globally,” said Dino Bekis, vice president and general manager, Wearables and Mixed Signal Solutions, Qualcomm Technologies.
Both companies recently joined other industry leaders to launch the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) and Qualcomm Technologies recently announced that it’s investing in a new company to advance RISC-V hardware development.
The open source instruction set architecture (ISA) allows companies to develop completely custom cores. This encourages innovation and more companies to enter the marketplace. Qualcomm Technologies said RISC-V’s openness, flexibility, and scalability benefits the entire value chain, from silicon vendors to OEMs, end devices, and consumers.
Qualcomm Technologies has a technology roadmap to scale the technologies that launched the mobile revolution – including advanced connectivity, high-performance, low-power compute, on-device intelligence and more – to the next generation of connected smart devices across industries. Innovations and its Snapdragon platforms will help enable cloud-edge convergence, transform industries, accelerate the digital economy, said the company.
Qualcomm includes licensing business, QTL, and a patent portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, , a subsidiary of Qualcomm, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of our engineering, research and development functions, and substantially all of products and services businesses, including its QCT semiconductor business.
