Update 1 (20/02/2021 @ 15:09 ET): We can confirm that Google is testing GS101 silicone for its 2021 Pixel phones. Click here for more information. The article, as published earlier today on April 2, 2021, is preserved below.
According to a new report, Google is expected to launch a custom smartphone chip this fall, presumably with the Pixel 6. The company has reportedly investigated the development of its own system on a chip (SoC), and it may finally ends when it begins.
9to5Google Friday reports the Google-made chip, internally known as Whitechapel, will be the first of many custom SoCs destined for future Google devices this year. These include smartphones such as the Pixel 6 and Chromebooks – similar to Apple’s range of iPhones, iPads and Macs, which feature custom chips.
Whitechapel is reportedly being developed in collaboration with Samsung Semiconductor’s large-scale system integration (SLSI) division. This means that Google’s disk may include agreements with Samsung’s Exynos, including software components, 9to5Google said. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had previously teased that the company would make slightly deeper investments in hardware, and Whitechapel could be.
9to5Google claims to have seen a document confirming Google’s upcoming plans. “In the document, Whitechapel is used in conjunction with the code name ‘Slider’ – a reference we also found in the Google Camera app,” 9to5Google said. “From what we can work together, we believe that Slider is a shared platform for the first Whitechapel SoC. Internally, Google refers to this chip as ‘GS101’, with ‘GS’ possibly being the abbreviation for ‘Google Silicon’.
According to previous reports, Google’s 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 off the shelf and be manufactured according to Samsung’s 5nm manufacturing process. Based on this, we expect Whitechapel to be a mid-range chipset comparable to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Series.
The biggest benefit of switching to custom silicone is greater control over driver updates. Google will no longer be dependent on Qualcomm for driver updates and will therefore be able to update drivers to be more compatible with newer versions of Android. We can even see that the new chips support 5 generations of Android OS updates compared to the current 3 generations of support that Pixel devices are currently receiving.
Google has previously built custom chips and partnered with Intel in 2017 to develop the Pixel Visual Core for the Pixel 2. Google will be able to integrate the Pixel Visual Core into the SoC, potentially enabling new camera features in the upcoming Pixel 6 . a custom SoC will probably also be cheaper to make and use compared to buying a chip from Qualcomm or Samsung.
The popular image is the Pixel 5
Update 1: Confirmation
After viewing internal documentation related to Google’s next Pixel devices, XDA can now confirm that Google is working on the new GS101 silicon for its 2021 Pixel phones. According to our source, it appears that the SoC will include a 3-cluster setup with a TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). Google also refers to its next Pixel devices as ‘dauntless-equipped phones’, which we believe refers to an integrated Titan M security chip (codenamed ‘Citadel’).
Dauntless appeared in the Chromium Gerrit where it is called GSC, which in my opinion means Google Security Chip. So it could be a universal security chip for Chromebooks and Android. (Google is working on ‘Dauntless-equipped phones’, which I assume are the following pixels.)
– Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) 2 April 2021