With its first Ultra-branded Galaxy Watch, Samsung introduced a brand-new chip that offers increased performance and efficiency. And it seems that Qualcomm has found a liking to that chip, as it is reportedly making an extremely similar Snapdragon Wear chip for smartwatches.

A report from Android Authority claims that Qualcomm is working on a new chip with model number SW6100. The alphabets SW in the model number stand for Snapdragon Wear, and is in line with the model number of the Snapdragon Wear W5 Gen 1, which is SW5100. This new chip is said to be internally called Aspen and is currently in the testing phase.

This upcoming chip reportedly has a five-core CPU featuring one Cortex-A78 core and four Cortex-A55 cores. This is a huge upgrade over previous Snapdragon Wear chips that used four Cortex-A55 CPU cores. And it is exactly similar to the CPU core configuration that Samsung used in the Exynos W1000. This new chip should bring a major performance improvement compared to previous Snapdragon Wear chips.

The chip also supports LPDDR5X RAM as opposed to previous chips' LPDDR4 RAM, and this should improve app loading speed and power efficiency, which could sometimes be a problem on Wear OS-based smartwatches.

While the Exynos chip is built on Samsung Foundry's 3nm GAA process, the upcoming Snapdragon Wear chip is desgined to be fabricated on TSMC's process node, but it isn't clear which exact node it will be built upon. Other things about Qualcomm's upcoming smartwatch chip are still unclear.

This chip could be used in next-generation Wear OS smartwatches that will be launched later this year or sometime next year. Those smartwatches could be from brands like OnePlus, OPPO, TicWatch, and Xiaomi, and they could compete with the Galaxy Watch 8 and the refreshed Galaxy Watch Ultra that were launched recently.