Qualcomm Inc. wants a larger slice of the wearables market with a new chip designed to take Android watches to the next level.

The Snapdragon Wear 3100, a successor to the 2100 model released in February 2016, brings to market a new architecture that Qualcomm claims is specifically designed for wearables versus previous chips that utilized a phone architecture shrunk for a watch.

In an interview with Engadget, Pankaj Kedia, Qualcomm’s senior director of smart wearables, explained that people use watches in a different way to phones. “The way people interact with their watches is different from how they use their phones,” Kedia explained. “We only truly interact with our smartwatches about 5 percent of the time while during the rest of the time the watch is just sitting on your wrist … showing you the time.”

Android watches, particularly those running Snapdragon chips, have all suffered from battery life issues in the past because the main processor was tasked with both idle and active time. But the new architecture throws that on its head with the addition of a secondary low-power processor that handles most of the work when a smartwatch isn’t in use.

Used to power a watch’s sensors and ambient display, the secondary processor is claimed to use up to 20 times less energy than the main processor. That has the added benefit of massively increasing battery time in a watch or other wearable using the Snapdragon Wear 3100.

In more technical terms, the 3100 has four A7 cores and two secondary chips — a digital signal processor and an ultralow-power coprocessor and comes in at a tiny 5.2 by 4 millimeters. If that’s not impressive enough in a device so small, the chip also has near-field communications built in, a 4G LTE modem with high-performance gallium arsenide power amplifiers, and a new power management system that is claimed to make charging more efficient.

The first watches with the chip are due during the holiday season from the Fossil Group Inc., Louis Vuitton and Montblanc International GmbH.

Photos: Qualcomm