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Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon Wear Elite Chip for Smartwatches and AI Wearables – Part of Samsung Galaxy Watch Next

03. 03. 2026 Tuesday / By: Robert Denes / Industrial / Exact time: BST / Print this page

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At Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm has unveiled a new, high-end Snapdragon Wear Elite chipset for smartwatches and similar AI-focused devices. The new chip promises significant improvements in performance, graphics, battery life, and AI capabilities.

In Qualcomm’s lineup, the Snapdragon Wear Elite is a step up from the previous Snapdragon W5 and W5+ Gen 2 chips. The Snapdragon Wear Elite is made on a more efficient 3-nanometer process than previous Wear chips, and is the first to be used in a Wear series on a large scale. LITTLE architecture. The CPU consists of one 2.1GHz high-performance core and four 1.95GHz energy-efficient cores.

Qualcomm says that single-core performance is up to five times that of the Snapdragon W5+ Gen 2 chip. The improvements are expected to be particularly noticeable in app launch speed, multitasking, and device startup. On the graphics side, the Snapdragon Wear Elite’s Adreno GPU can deliver up to seven times the maximum frame rate. Support extends to 1080p at 60 frames per second, allowing for smoother interfaces and visual effects.

"Snapdragon is transforming personal computing by enabling a new category of Personal AI devices. Spanning a broad range of form factors, these devices are no longer simply extensions of the smartphone, but active participants in a distributed AI network across mobile, compute, XR, wearables, and more,” said Alex Katouzian, Executive Vice President and Group General Manager, Mobile, Compute, & XR (MCX), Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “Snapdragon Wear Elite delivers powerful edge AI with an integrated NPU architecture and advanced sensor processing, enabling true, Personal AI experiences. This is our next step toward our vision of the “Ecosystem of You”, where intelligence seamlessly travels with the user, learning and adapting to their context across their personal devices."

The Snapdragon Wear Elite is also built for on-device AI. In a first for Wear chips, its Hexago NPU will be able to run models with up to two billion parameters directly on the device at up to 10 tokens per second. This will enable computer vision, text-to-text solutions, text-to-speech capabilities, personal AI agents, and on-device translation and transcription, among other things.

"With our AI perceptive companion concept, or ‘Project Maxwell’ that we showcased at CES, we are exploring the limits of what's possible in personal intelligence,” said Francois LaFlamme, Vice President and Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Motorola. “The shift toward Personal AI depends on a foundation that can balance on‑device intelligence, sensing, connectivity, and more efficient compute, so these devices can move with you, learn from you, and support more intuitive interactions throughout the day. The Snapdragon Wear Elite Platform gives us the opportunity to fully explore the potential of concepts like Maxwell and to push even further beyond what we have demonstrated so far."

In addition, the chip includes a discrete, low-power eNPU AI accelerator that replaces the previous coprocessor architecture. The feature is designed for always-on features such as keyword detection, activity tracking, and noise cancellation. In terms of connectivity, the Snapdragon Wear Elite supports Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 6.0, UWB, GNSS positioning, 5G RedCap cellular network connectivity, and NB-NTN satellite connections. It also has ultra-low-power Wi-Fi, which offers up to 80 percent lower power consumption. This allows the radio to be kept on all the time without significant battery drain. Also worth noting is the integration of UWB support, which opens up new possibilities for precise positioning and unlocking of devices, for example. Overall, the battery life enabled by the Snapdragon Wear Elite is said to be improved by about 30 percent compared to the previous generation.

"With Wear OS, we are reimagining the smartwatch experience and moving from an operating system to an always with you intelligent system that understands and works for you,” said Bjørn Kilburn, GM of Wear OS by Google. “The Snapdragon Wear Elite platform opens new possibilities, delivering the performance, battery life and connectivity essential for the next generation of Wear OS."

More efficient charging is also supported in terms of the SoC: Qualcomm says the Snapdragon Wear Elite allows for up to 50 percent charging in 10 minutes for batteries between 300 and 600 milliamp-hours. Fast charging is done at a voltage of 9 volts.

"Samsung and Qualcomm Technologies share a long history of advancing what’s possible in mobile computing, and we are thrilled to extend this partnership into the wearable category,” said InKang Song, Executive Vice President and Head of Technology Strategy Team, MX Business at Samsung Electronics. “By integrating the new Snapdragon Wear Elite platform, the next-generation Galaxy Watch will be an even more holistic wellness companion. This marks an important step in our ongoing efforts to deliver more efficient and personalized experiences, right from your wrist."

Snapdragon Wear Elite supports Android, Wear OS, and Linux-based wearables. Google is making Wear OS even smarter with AI. In response to Qualcomm’s announcement, Samsung confirmed that its next-generation Galaxy Watch will use the Snapdragon Wear Elite chip, making it an even more comprehensive wellness partner. Motorola is one of the partners for the Snapdragon Wear Elite device maker, specifically in the new type of wearable AI devices. Snapdragon Wear Elite is not limited to smartwatches. Qualcomm says the chip is also suitable for other AI-centric devices, such as smart glasses with cameras and various wearable AI device solutions.

The first commercial devices with the Snapdragon Wear Elite chip are expected to hit the market in the coming months.

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