Qualcomm Technologies announced that the company is building on its long-standing collaboration with Google by bringing a RISC-V based wearables solution for use with Google's Wear OS. Qualcomm and Google say that work has begun and will continue, to ensure that applications and a robust software ecosystem for RISC-V will be available for commercial launches. Qualcomm plans to commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US.
The expanded framework will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance. Leading up to this, the companies will continue to invest in Snapdragon Wear platforms as a smartwatch silicon provider for the Wear OS ecosystem, which is an attempt to avoid the fragmentation that has impeded cloning companies to be successful at competing with the Apple Watch and Watch OS.
"Qualcomm Technologies have been a pillar of the Wear OS ecosystem, providing high performance, low power systems for many of our OEM partners," says Bjorn Kilburn, GM 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 as a leading silicon provider for Wear OS. Our Snapdragon Wear platform innovations will help the Wear OS ecosystem rapidly evolve and streamline new device launches globally," confirms Dino Bekis, vice president and general manager, Wearables and Mixed Signal Solutions, Qualcomm Technologies.
Both companies recently joined other leading manufacturers to launch the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE - www.riseproject.dev) and Qualcomm Technologies recently announced that it's investing in a new company to advance RISC-V hardware development.
As an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA), RISC-V encourages innovation by allowing any company to develop completely custom cores. This allows more companies to enter the marketplace, which creates increased innovation and competition. RISC-V's openness, flexibility, and scalability benefits the entire value chain – from silicon vendors to OEMs, end devices, and consumers.
Commercial product launch of the RISC-V wearable based solution timing will be disclosed at a later date.
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