Application processors for wearable devices need to be more power-efficient to fit into the small gadgets, an industry watcher said.

“Currently, the performance of application processers for smart watches is much lower than those for smartphones because wearables can only use small batteries,” said Lee Hyuck-jae, head of the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology’s department of system semiconductors.

An application processor, which is the equivalent of a PC’s central processing unit, is the core system for smart devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Processors are expanding to wearable devices such as smart watches and glasses, but their performance is constrained by small, short-life batteries.

For instance, LG Electronics’ new smart watch, the G Watch, uses Qualcomm’s Snap Dragon 400, which is much less efficient than the Snap Dragon 801, used in the G3 smartphone.

The higher the performance of the processor, the faster it can run the apps. 

“Smart watches do not use high-performance application processors because most of them do not yet feature phone capability, which requires high power consumption,” Lee said.

However, as demand grows for wearables with more functions such as phone and health-related apps, the development of both high-performance and low-power application processors will be necessary, he added.

Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are focusing on developing application processors for wearable devices.

Recently, Samsung Electronics used its own application processor, which was developed for low-powered devices, for the latest version of its smart watch, the Gear 2.

By Shin Ji-hye (shinjh@heraldcorp.com)