When it comes to smartphone processors: its literally Qualcomm, proprietary or nothing. Intel has tried a few times as well as MediaTek and others but none have been able to stick around. Based on recent rumblings, it sounds like Google will be stepping away to do their own soon.
The folks over at Axios says Google is building their own processor for their Pixel smartphone next year. It is codenamed ‘Whitechapel’ and is built on Samsung’s 5nm 8-core ARM CPU and will be optimized for machine-learning and Google Assistant. This isn’t something they just thought about as they’ll have working versions of the chip in a few weeks.
Now its not that far-fetched as Google crafted their own co-processor w/ Pixel Visual Core and the Pixel Neural Core to better handle their computational photography. As well as their own Titan M security chipset so they’re completely stepping into uncharted territory. However, this won’t be a secondary processor but the main one to power everything so there is still a huge amount of risk involved.
Future versions of this chip, if successful, could make its way to their Chromebooks as well but they’re gonna start w/ the Pixel phones 1st.This still gets me excited to what could w/ the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 5a if that’s still a thing.
Thoughts?
