I have been thinking a lot about the different chips suitable for smartwatches, and unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to get any comparable performance metrics, neither with benchmarks nor official statements from the manufacturers. I would love to see just how well the Apple S4 SiP fares against the competition, which in some cases can outclass the Apple Watch Series 4 by a huge margin. From the top of my head, there are three main competitors:
1. Huawei
With a line-up of nice looking, well priced watches, Huawei is a strong contender. Especially since they do offer 14 days of battery life with normal use (with the Watch GT for example), as opposed to 18 hours for the Apple Watch. I have to admit that better battery life is something I would love to have on the Apple Watch – it doesn't even last a full day when it's a long one (i.e. getting up at 06:30 am and not being home again before 02:00 am).
As for performance, I can't find any evidence on how fast the custom Cortex-M4 ARM SoC actually runs, but the watch performance seems fast enough. Everywhere I look, it is stated that the watch comes only with 16 MB RAM and 128 MB storage, which seems too low to be true?
2. Samsung
With competitively priced hardware, a nice Tizen-based OS and custom SoCs, Samsung is a strong competitor. Again, I couldn't find any performance metrics for the Exynos 9110, which is used for example in the Galaxy Watch Active, but it should be one of the fastest smartwatch chips on the market. It comes with a dual-core 1.15 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU, a Mali T720 GPU, 768 MB RAM and 4 GB storage.
3. Wear OS
With the outdated Snapdragon Wear 2100 and the lackluster Snapdragon Wear 2600 and 3100, I don't think Wear OS is competitive at all at the moment. These chips are so slow, even some menus aren't displayed fluidly.
So, does anyone have any information about the speed of these chips or am I missing any important platform? Please share your knowledge, I will update this first post with any useful information aggregated in this thread.
1. Huawei
With a line-up of nice looking, well priced watches, Huawei is a strong contender. Especially since they do offer 14 days of battery life with normal use (with the Watch GT for example), as opposed to 18 hours for the Apple Watch. I have to admit that better battery life is something I would love to have on the Apple Watch – it doesn't even last a full day when it's a long one (i.e. getting up at 06:30 am and not being home again before 02:00 am).
As for performance, I can't find any evidence on how fast the custom Cortex-M4 ARM SoC actually runs, but the watch performance seems fast enough. Everywhere I look, it is stated that the watch comes only with 16 MB RAM and 128 MB storage, which seems too low to be true?
2. Samsung
With competitively priced hardware, a nice Tizen-based OS and custom SoCs, Samsung is a strong competitor. Again, I couldn't find any performance metrics for the Exynos 9110, which is used for example in the Galaxy Watch Active, but it should be one of the fastest smartwatch chips on the market. It comes with a dual-core 1.15 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU, a Mali T720 GPU, 768 MB RAM and 4 GB storage.
3. Wear OS
With the outdated Snapdragon Wear 2100 and the lackluster Snapdragon Wear 2600 and 3100, I don't think Wear OS is competitive at all at the moment. These chips are so slow, even some menus aren't displayed fluidly.
So, does anyone have any information about the speed of these chips or am I missing any important platform? Please share your knowledge, I will update this first post with any useful information aggregated in this thread.
