Google seems to be working on its next flagship phone dubbed as the Pixel 6. We have already witnessed a series of leaks and rumours about the smartphone but nothing's been confirmed yet. Moreover, the company is yet to reveal anything about the handset. In the latest development, it has been reported that the company is planning to launch the Pixel 6 with Google’s GS101 processor which is codenamed “Whitechapel.” This means that the search giant is no more reliable on Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets.
According to the report from 9to5Google, the search giant has joined hands with Samsung and the folks at Samsung’s System Large-scale Integration (SLSI) division are the ones who are taking care of CPU cores, memory modems and integration of other SoC components. Furthermore, the report suggests that Samsung’s 5nm LPE fabrication process is being used to build the Samsung chipset.
It seems that Google is planning to launch the devices with Whitechapel chips in 2021, maybe in the second half of the year. The documentation viewed by the folks at 9to5Google suggests that Google will launch the Pixel phone by this fall and it would be powered by the company’s Whitechapel platform. Earlier it was rumoured that the company is following Apple’s strategy by developing its in-house chipset which can be used in Pixel phones and Chromebooks. Exactly how Apple uses its chipsets in iPhones and Mac.
Going with the SamMobile report, the Google chipset has some similar characteristics like Exynos processor, this also includes software components. But we can safely assume that Google will remove Samsung’s default ISP and NPU components and encrypt its designs. Reports also suggest that the Pixel 6 series is codenamed ‘Slider’ and the series consist of two phones with code names ‘Raven’ and ‘Oriole’. These two smartphones could be the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6 XL. Both the smartphones are expected to launch in the third quarter of 2021. It would be interesting to see how Google’s first in-house processor is going to perform and how it's going to stand against Snapdragon chipsets.
What You Should Expect From it?
Now the question is how well the chipset is going to perform and what we should expect from it. Long story short, it would be better not to expect that Google’s Whitechapel SoC is going to be more powerful than Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 888 or Apple’s A14 Bionic chipset. The Whitechapel processor is built by Samsung and most of the core processing components will be similar to the ARM Cortex and Mali components.
Moreover, Google doesn’t have a dedicated mobile CPU department which will help it in building a complete ARM-based core of its own. The search giant also misses out on the mobile graphics division which means Samsung will more likely use ARM Mali-G78 or maybe a newer version. We all know that Qualcomm’s Adreno always outperforms the Mali GPU. Considering all this, we can safely assume that the Google chipset is not going to be a game-changer and it might be less powerful than the existing chipsets.
