The original Pixel phone got launched in 2015, and since then all the Google phones have been using Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, like most of the other android phones, but the Google Pixel 6 might ditch the Snapdragon SoC.
Google Pixel 6
The Google Pixel launch is coming closer, but some of the rumors being heard are that this year the Pixel might not use a Snapdragon SoC as Google is reportedly making its own CPU and the project is being held under the codename “Whitechapel”. It is also being heard that those chips might be connected with Samsung’s Exynos somehow and might have some similarities with it. A new report from 9to5Google also suggests the Google Pixel 6 might ditch Qualcomm for something else entirely. According to internal Google documents seen by them, the Pixel 6 could land with a Google-designed chip. If this is true, it will be a huge change for the industry as the new chip can be very well optimized for android just like Apple does with its chips and IOS.
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’ll also have an ARM Mali GPU, and be fabricated on Samsung’s 5nm manufacturing process. Based on this, we expect Whitechapel will be an upper mid-range chip that can be compared with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 700 series.
Pros & Cons
If this is done correctly the pros will be endless, Google will have more control over their devices, the optimization could be done better, the driver updates could be launched by Google themselves, Google will no longer be reliant on Qualcomm for driver updates and can thus update drivers to be compatible with newer versions of Android for longer. We may even see the new chips be supported for 5 generations of Android OS updates compared to the current 3 generations of support that Pixel devices currently receive. Creating a custom SoC will also be cheaper to make and use compared to buying a chip from Qualcomm or Samsung.
Now if this gets messed up somehow, Google could end up like Samsung and Exynos. Even now after so many years the Snapdragon version of the same devices still outperforms the Exynos version of the phones. If we see this there could be a huge problem for Google and we may see the sales of Pixel declining.
I personally even think that if Google gets successful on this maybe other android manufacturers will also use chips from Google to get faster OS updates over a longer span of time, it could be a game-changer for Google.
What do you guys think of this? Do you think Google will outperform Qualcomm on making chipsets, or it will be a massive fail? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
