The tech giant Google might eventually dump Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC for its home-made SoC to power its future Pixel phones, and possibly Chromebooks according to a recent report. Apple, Samsung, and Huawei has been using its SoC to power its smartphones for years now and could be taking a step in that direction.
The chip is code-named Whitechapel and is said to include “an 8-core ARM processor,” and will be optimized to utilize Google’s machine learning technology. The chip may also bring improvements to the Google Assistant’s performance according to the report.
Axios also reported the Whitechapel chip could also power future Chromebooks; however, that’s a long shot for now. Interestingly, Google will be using Samsung’s upcoming 5nm manufacturing process for its chip.
Google is not entirely new to chip manufacturing, as it has building chips for its smartphones, the likes of Pixel Visual Core which aids in smartphone photography, the Titan M security chip to handle the phone’s verified boot and cryptographic key storage and more recently the Soli radar chip that brought gestures and face unlock to the Google Pixel 4.
Google using its own chip on it phones could bring better battery life and optimizations just like Apple is doing with the Bionic chip. In recent news, there have been stories that users have started to question the performance of Samsung’s Exynos chips but nothing of such has been received for Huawei.
It’s also worth mentioning that Qualcomm’s new chips have become expensive and is forcing manufacturers to release over-priced devices. Google’s own chip could also help Google in decreasing the price of future Pixel devices.
Read also: OnePlus 8 And 8 Pro With Fluid AMOLED Display, 12GB RAM Launched
According to reports, Google will be sticking with previous generation Snapdragon chip in its Pixel 5 to keep the costs in check.
Google’s Whitechapel will have to compete with Qualcomm chips and others as expected to comes to Google Pixel devices as early as next year.