Update 1 (4/2/2021 at 3:10 pm ET): We can corroborate that Google is testing the GS101 silicon for its 2021 Pixel phones. Click here for more information. The article, as published today on April 2, 2021, is preserved below.
Google will launch a custom smartphone chip this fall, presumably with the Pixel 6, according to a new report. There are rumors that the company is exploring the development of its own custom system on a chip (SoC), and this year may finally be when it launches.
9to5Google reported on Friday that the chip made by Google, internally known as Whitechapel, will be launched this year as the first of many custom SoCs intended for future Google devices. That includes smartphones like the Pixel 6 and Chromebooks – similar to Apple’s line of iPhones, iPads and Macs, which feature custom chips.
Google is reportedly developing Whitechapel in coordination with Samsung Semiconductor’s large-scale system integration (SLSI) division. This means that the Google chip can share similarities with Samsung’s Exynos, including software components, 9to5Google said. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had previously teased that the company would make “some deeper hardware investments”, and Whitechapel could be that.
9to5Google claims to have seen a document that confirmed Google’s future plans. “In the document, Whitechapel is used in connection with the codename ‘Slider’ – a reference that we also find in the Google Camera app,” 9to5Google said. “As far as we can gather, we believe that Slider is a shared platform for the first Whitechapel SoC. Internally, Google refers to this chip as ‘GS101’, with ‘GS’ potentially being the abbreviation for “Google Silicon”.
According to previous reports, the Google chip will have an octa-core ARM CPU with two Cortex-A78 + two Cortex-A76 + four Cortex-A55 cores. It will also have an ARM Mali GPU ready to use and will be manufactured in Samsung’s 5 nm manufacturing process. Based on that, we expect Whitechapel to be a superior mid-range chip that can be compared to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7.
The main benefit of switching to custom silicon will be greater control over driver updates. Google will no longer depend on Qualcomm for driver updates and therefore can update drivers to be compatible with the latest versions of Android for longer. We can even see the new chips being supported by 5 generations of Android operating system updates compared to the current 3 generations of support that Pixel devices currently receive.
Google built custom chips before, collaborating with Intel in 2017 to develop Pixel Visual Core for Pixel 2. By the way, Google could integrate Pixel Visual Core into SoC, possibly allowing for new camera features in the next Pixel 6. Creation a custom SoC is also likely to be cheaper to make and use compared to buying a chip from Qualcomm or Samsung.
The featured image is Pixel 5
Update 1: Corroboration
Having seen some internal documentation related to Google’s next Pixel devices, XDA now you can corroborate that Google is working on the new GS101 silicon for its 2021 Pixel phones. According to our source, it seems that the SoC will have a configuration of 3 clusters with a TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). Google also refers to its next Pixel devices as “phones equipped with dexterity”, which we believe refers to them with an integrated Titan M security chip (codenamed “Citadel)
Dauntless appeared on Chromium Gerrit, where it is referred to as GSC, which I suppose means Google Security Chip. Therefore, it could be a universal security chip for Chromebooks and Android. (Google is working on “phones equipped with Audacity,” which I assume are the next pixels.)
– Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) April 2, 2021