Last week, there were reports claiming Google is working on a custom Exynos chipset for Pixel phones. A new report from Axios citing industry sources familiar with the matter says the software giant would rather launch it under its own name and gives more details about the chipset.
The chipset is designed in co-operation with Samsung and bears the codename “Whitechapel”. As we know already, it will be an octa-core ARM processor with two ARM Cortex-A78 cores, two Cortex-A76 cores, and four Cortex-A55 cores manufactured on Samsung’s 5nm process.
According to the report, the chipset would include hardware optimizations for pushing Machine Learning and enhancing the efficiency of “Always-On” of Google Assistant. Google is already using dedicated chips on its Pixel devices, Neural Core on the Pixel 4 for instance.
The report doesn’t really come as a surprise since Google had reportedly hired experienced chip designers from Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Nvidia to make its own chipsets last year. Contrary to the previous report, Google must have had a change in strategic decisions to announce its own chips to begin with, instead of introducing it under Exynos branding and migrating to a native one later on.
Also, the timeline for the availability of this new chip according to Axios’ report is next year whereas the former report suggested it would be available this year. That is, you could possibly expect the new chip on the Pixel 6 series.
The availability of Google’s chip on Chromebooks (especially Pixelbooks) is expected to take longer even if everything goes according to the plan. With all that said, we will have to wait to see if Google’s in-house chip manages to stand out of the crowd or would end up being a disappointment for Pixel and Pixelbook enthusiasts.
