Google Plans To Power ‘Pixel 6’ Using Its Custom ‘Whitechapel’ Chip

In April 2020, there were rumours that Google is working on its own chip for Pixel phones and Chromebooks.

Recently, 9to5Google gave a report that the Tech Giant will launch this custom smartphone chip. It stated that the presumed Pixel 6 will be among the first devices to run on the “GS101” Whitechapel chip.

This will be the first of many custom SoCs destined for future Google devices. That includes smartphones such as the Pixel 6 and Chromebooks — similar to Apple’s lineup of iPhones, iPads, and Macs, which feature custom chips.

The Whitechapel is being built together with Samsung Semiconductor’s system-large scale integration (SLSI) division. It will share similarities to Samsung’s Exynos, including software components.

9to5Google confirmed this saying, “Whitechapel is used in connection with the codename ‘Slider’ — a reference we’ve also found in the Google Camera app”. “From what we can piece together, we believe that Slider is a shared platform for the first Whitechapel SoC.

Previous reports stated that the Google chip will come with an octa-core ARM CPU having two Cortex-A78 + two Cortex-A76 + four Cortex-A55 cores. It will also have an off-the-shelf 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 7 series”, 9to5Google reported.

The advantage of changing to custom silicon will be superior control over driver updates. Google will no longer depend on Qualcomm for updates on drivers 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 five generations of Android OS updates compared to the current 3 generations of support that Pixel devices currently receive.

Google has developed custom chips before. In 2017, it co-developed with Intel to produce the Pixel Visual Core for the Pixel 2. Incidentally, it could incorporate the Pixel Visual Core into the SoC, possibly facilitating new camera capabilities in the upcoming Pixel 6. Designing a custom SoC will likely be inexpensive to make and use when likened to buying a chip from Qualcomm or Samsung.