What We're Expecting From Google's Custom 'Whitechapel' SoC In the Pixel 6

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It sounds like this custom Google SoC-powered Pixel is really going to happen. Echoing reports from about a year ago, 9to5Google is reporting that the Pixel 6 is expected to ship with Google's custom "Whitechapel" SoC instead of a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. The report says "Google refers to this chip as 'GS101,' with 'GS' potentially being short for 'Google Silicon.'" It also notes that chip will be shared across the two Google phones that are currently in development, the Pixel 6 and something like a "Pixel 5a 5G." 9to5 says it has viewed documentation that points to Samsung's SLSI division (Team Exynos) being involved, which lines up with the earlier report from Axios saying the chip is "designed in cooperation with Samsung" and should be built on Samsung's 5nm foundry lines. 9to5Google says the chip "will have some commonalities with Samsung Exynos, including software components."

XDA Developers says it can corroborate the report, saying, "According to our source, it seems the SoC will feature a 3 cluster setup with a TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). Google also refers to its next Pixel devices as 'dauntless-equipped phones,' which we believe refers to them having an integrated Titan M security chip (code-named 'Citadel')." A "3 cluster setup" would be something like how the Snapdragon 888 works, which has three CPU core sizes: a single large ARM X1 core for big single-threaded workloads, three medium Cortex A78 cores for multicore work, and four Cortex A55 cores for background work. The Pixel 6 should be out sometime in Q4 2021, and Pixel phones always heavily, heavily leak before they launch. So I'm sure we'll see more of this thing soon. "I think the biggest benefit we'll see from a Google SoC is an expanded update timeline," writes Ron Amadeo. "Android updates go a lot smoother when you get support from the SoC manufacturer, but Qualcomm abandons all its chips after the three-year mark for major updates. This lack of support makes updates significantly harder than they need to be, and today that's where Google draws the line at updates."

"Beyond easier updates, I don't know that we can expect much from Whitechapel," adds Amadeo, noting that lots of Android manufacturers have made their own chips but none of them have been able to significantly beat Qualcomm. "It's hard to be bullish on Google's SoC future when the company doesn't seem to be making the big-money acquisitions and licensing deals that Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung are making. But at least it's a start."

Pretty happy with the 3A XL I got last year

[bobstreo]

The last (samsung) phone I had got exactly one system update. Used it until the (replaceable but why bother) battery bulged so hard you couldn't close the case. That was after about 7 or 8 years.

Pixels are pretty much the best overall android phones with minimal junk installed (If you want an android phone)

I'll probably be in the market for a pixel 6 or 7 at some point. maybe.

Or maybe a Pro1 X?

https://www.fxtec.com/pro1x [fxtec.com]

Re: Pretty happy with the 3A XL I got last year

[BAReFO0t]

If you don't could Google's apps as junk, you mean.

I always founs it weird that people (rightly) considered other manufacturer's takes on certain apps junk, because they came in addition to the GApps, but never consider the GApps junk, even though they are junk aswell.

I mean ... Hangouts? Pay? Duo? News? KeepNotes? Drive? Chrome? Photos? (!=Gallery) Maps? Digital Wellbeing?? Come, on! AOSP Chromium and recommend picking a proper (=offline) navigation app, and be done with it!
Even Play Store can be considere

Five bucks

[Rick Schumann]

Five bucks says it's got some sort of surveillance tech baked right into the silicon.

Re:

[weilawei]

"Why is is ILLEGAL to give voters water?"

The same reason it's illegal to give them milk. Supplying milk or water is terrorism.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Well if you make it legal to give them milk, it's a slippery slope all the way down to breastfeeding in public - and we can't have THAT.

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

Clearly humanity was a mistake. We should all just go crawl back into the ocean and develop gills and fins again.

Re:

[lessSockMorePuppet]

Okay Thanos.

Re: Five bucks

[BAReFO0t]

Literally all the other lifeforms on this planet agree. And even many humans do.

From a non-human perspective, we're an explosive planetary pathogen. Luckily, we'll be a blip on geological time scales. Like any other previous extinction event.

Re: Five bucks

[AvitarX]

I sure hope.

I'd be pretty pissed if it didn't have a modem baked in.

Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it hilarious that Google's criticising Qualcomm for having only 3 years of support. Given GOOG's track record for creating and abandoning projects I'd be very surprised to see Google Silicon survive more than 3 years itself, or for there to ever be a GS102 wafer.

Re:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Google's support track record is somewhere between 'comical' and 'downright self-destructive' at this point; but it seems fair to note that Chromebooks, where they do call pretty much all the shots, have so far received the promised support window (which is longer than basically any Android phone; not so long as the 'pretty much until you don't care any more, with a few exceptions' of wintel/mainline linux systems).

It wouldn't be a giant shock if this chip ends up without a successor if the wind blows th

In Soviet Chinese America

[Nocturrne]

Google searches you....

What to expect of Google's Whitechapel

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Google's Jack-the-data-Ripper.

"leak"

[BAReFO0t]

At what point do you just call it a press release?

I mean you can't be that stupid to fall for that viral marketing shit...

In a way, that's the point...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

""Beyond easier updates, I don't know that we can expect much from Whitechapel," adds Amadeo, noting that lots of Android manufacturers have made their own chips but none of them have been able to significantly beat Qualcomm."

This is true(at times because Qualcomm loves flexing its modem patent portfolio, which is why US-release handsets have a way of being Qualcomm-based even when the EU/World releases are based on the vendor's own pet SoC; but unless Google is unable to find a remotely adequate modem somewhere the lesson of Qualcomm vs. the other Android SoCs and Apple seems, to me, to be that it might not matter very much:

If CPU/GPU performance were critical on the mobile side, we wouldn't even be talking about the modest differences between Qualcomm and Exynos etc; since Apple is currently embarrassing all of them on that score(also, most of the ones on the Android side that used to have custom core initiatives, Qualcomm included, seem to be moving toward stock ARM cores, which is likely to narrow the differences in the future). As it is, we seem to have gotten to the point where performance is adequate enough(at least if you don't sabotage it by RAM starvation or using the cheapest, nastiest, NAND you can find so I/O speeds drop off a cliff after a bit of real world use). This works to Google's advantage, because their odds of beating the average Android SoC vendor(at least outside of specific areas like, perhaps, their image processing stuff they've used in prior Pixels) are not so hot; but their odds of taking some stock ARM IP and stitching it together without making any dire mistakes are pretty good. If they can do that, they'll have a part that is "fast enough(like everyone else); but with their fancy camera stuff and with the support period of their choice", which was the whole point.

If their plan hinged on industry-leading performance right out of the gate I'd write it off as suicide; but it seems like all they need in order to get what they want is more or less exactly the same performance as everyone else asking TSMC to please fab some ARM IP for them; along with a couple of custom IP blocks they've already demonstrated that they can execute. That seems much, much, more readily achievable.