Google Pixel 6 is expected to debut sometime in October this year. Last year, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company would be making significant investments in its hardware during the Q3 2020 earnings call. He further said that the company had planned a great roadmap up till 2021. Many started suspecting that the company might be working on its processor called "Whitechapel" from that point on.
A report via 9to5Google revealed that smartphones coming by fall would be the company's first phones that will be powered by their "GS101" Whitechapel chipset. Hence, it might be true that Google is now going to discard Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC. Some of the rumours also allege that Google might also be collaborating with Samsung to build its Whitechapel chips. The chips are allegedly being built in the South Korean tech giant's system large scale integration (SLSI) division.
Whitechapel features
The "GS" in "GS101" Whitechapel chipsets stands for "Google Silicon". Reference for the "Slider" codename ascertained in the Google Camera app is supposed to be a shared platform for Whitechapel SoC. Since the chips rumoured to be built in Samsung's SLSI division, it is being suspected that it may have common features with Samsung Exynos.
The Google phones that are yet to come by October go by codenames "Raven" and "Oriole" and will be part of the Pixel 6 series. According to a report by XDA developers, Whitechapel chipsets are said to be equivalent to the Snapdragon 7-series chipsets. The 5nm octa-core arm chip might include two Cortex-A78 CPU core, two Cortex-A76 cores, and four Cortex-A55 cores besides an off-the-shelf ARM Mali GPU.
Google will enjoy a greater level of control over its driver updates as it will not have to rely upon Qualcomm for it. The upcoming Pixel handsets with the "GS101" chips are supposed to get 5 generations of OS updates which is a bonus because, as of now, the Pixel devices get 3 years of Android OS updates.
