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Google announced its new smartphones yesterday, the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. Those are the company’s new flagship handsets, long-awaited ones. Both of those phones come with Google’s first-ever mobile SoC, the Google Tensor, and that chip is an important piece of the Pixel 6 puzzle.
In this article, we’ll talk a bit more about it. We’ll share some Google Tensor specs with you, and also let you know how it directly affects some of the Pixel 6 features and performance. Quite frankly, without it, some of these features wouldn’t be possible.
The Google Tensor SoC is a rather important piece of the Pixel 6 & 6 Pro
This is Google’s very own chip, and it gives the company great control over what it does. It has way more control than it would with a third-party chip, of course. This is the chip that Google designed, basically.
The Google Tensor SoC is manufactured using 5nm architecture. It has 8 cores, 2 ARM Cortex-X1 cores clocked at 2.8GHz, 4 Cortex-A55 cores tuned to 1.8GHz, and 2 Cortex-A76 cores clocked at 2.25GHz.
In regards to graphics, the Tensor utilizes the Mali-G78 MP20 GPU. Google paired this processor with the Titan M2 security chip, by the way.
This chip should do great when it comes to machine learning
Now, Google says that this processor was co-designed with Google Research, which basically made it possible to build an AI/ML platform. Google Tensor does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to machine learning, and there are quite a few features on the phone that rely on it.
Face Unblur is the first feature that comes to mind. Thanks to machine learning, and this chip, it should be fairly easy to avoid blurry faces in your images. Google demonstrated this way back, and if it ends up working as shown, it will be an immensely useful feature.
Motion Mode is also something worth mentioning, and the same goes for Speech enhancement mode for videos. That’s not all, though. Google Assistant also benefits from the Tensor. Google demonstrated how fast Google Tensor can handle speech recognition. The company says that Google Assistant uses the most accurate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) out there, which comes in extremely handy when it comes to voice translations as well.
Many of the Pixel 6 features are possible because of the Google Tensor
All those features are possible because of Google Tensor, and the company says that power consumption is also minimal. That’s not all, though. The Tensor also plays a huge part in the computational photography section. It should enable the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro to provide better and more detailed images with new sensors that Google included.