According to a report by WinFuture, Qualcomm is planning another new chipset for Wear OS devices, even though the existing Wear 3100 has barely materialized in any devices. The upcoming silicon will feature 64-bit support, 12nm node, Cortex A53 CPU cores, and is alleged to go by one of two potential names: "Snapdragon Wear 429" or "Snapdragon Wear 2700". In short, it sounds like it might actually bring some decent performance to the platform.

Qualcomm's current Wear 3100, in comparison, uses a 32-bit design with A7-based CPU cores and a larger 28nm node. When Qualcomm revealed the 3100 last year, it claimed the larger node used was an intentional power-saving decision, and that the chip would operate more efficiently in a low-power state for longer periods. (In fact, it was even supposed to have a power-saving "sports mode" that never materialized.) Whatever Qualcomm's internal logic was for going with the larger node last year, this rumor would indicate that it has reversed course on that decision.

WinFuture says that the current testing platforms (WTP2700 and WTP429W) are each paired with one gig of LPDDR3 RAM and 8GB of EMMC storage, and a further "Track3" feature, which is speculated to be related to a power-saving mechanism, is also associated with the hardware — potentially tied to further heterogeneous compute mechanisms that move certain tasks to other lower-power chips/cores.

The "Wear 429" name, plus the other specifications listed, implies this new chip could be a tweaked or stripped-down version of the Snapdragon 429 Mobile Platform, which has the same node size, core designs, and has appeared in some recent mid-range Android phones and tablets. As a result, it could support clock speeds of up to 2.0GHz, up substantially from 1.2GHz in the Wear 3100.

Most current Wear OS devices are running the old Wear 2100 platform, and only a handful with the new Wear 3100 have been released. Given the Wear 429/Wear 2700 only exists via this rumor, we might have quite a wait in store before it arrives in any Wear OS devices — assuming Wear OS is still around.