Qualcomm announces RISC-V chip for Wear OS-based wearable devices

Highly anticipated: After betting on the future of RISC-V with an industry-wide alliance, Qualcomm is now bringing its first chip based at the open-supply architecture to the mass marketplace. The American chipmaker will join Google in developing a brand new hardware platform for the Wear OS gadget.

Qualcomm has just introduced an "extended" collaboration with Google within the wearable enterprise, with the aim of developing a "RISC-V Snapdragon Wear" platform for the next generation of Wear OS products. RISC-V-primarily based wearable solutions will enjoy a global launch at a later date, Qualcomm says, and may be instrumental in cementing the organisation's position because the main "silicon issuer" for Wear OS smartwatches.

In its declaration, Qualcomm highlights the open-source nature of the RISC-V education set architecture (ISA), which presents chip producers and designers with the capability to broaden absolutely custom computing cores. More organizations can enter the marketplace, Qualcomm says, with obvious benefits for standard innovation and competition.

The RISC-V era is open, flexible and scalable, Qualcomm states, and it may advantage the whole value chain that goes from silicon vendors to OEM producers, end devices, and subsequently customers. Wear OS widespread supervisor Bjorn Kilburn said that Qualcomm technologies have up to now been a "pillar" of the Wear OS surroundings, and Google is ready to extend its partnership with the corporation to deliver a RISC-V wearable technique to the market.

Google is certainly operating hard to show the open-source ISA into a "tier 1 platform" for Android, the cell device imparting the software program foundation for the Wear OS platform. Mountain View have to make sure that low-degree additives of the Android OS will work well on RISC-V chips, at the same time as app help ought to be less difficult to gain as they may be by and large written in Java or the move-platform, Java-interoperable Kotlin programming language.

Qualcomm is investing loads of strength (and cash) into turning RISC-V into a a success chip technology. The chipmaker these days announced an alliance with other leading generation businesses to sell RISC-V adoption, and the newly added initiative for Wear OS devices will probably be the primary, actual debut of the ISA inside the mass-market of Android devices.

Aside from being a flexible and completely customizable hardware platform, RISC-V may also offer Qualcomm, Google and different cellular-associated agencies with a actual opportunity to Arm architectures. The Softbank-owned chip dressmaker is not as reliable (and predictable) as it used to be, and now the company appears in most cases inquisitive about wooing stockholders with a more aggressive enterprise version. Arm currently sued Qualcomm, that's one in all its largest industry companions, over Nuvia licensing prices.