It may not be long until Google ditches Qualcomm and Intel for its own brand of chips. According to a report from Axios, the company has made significant headway in the development of its in-house processor, “Whitechapel,” which was built with the help of Samsung and its 5 nm process.
While Google allegedly has working chips on hand already, it isn’t clear when they’ll debut in the company’s first-party lineup of Pixel products, which comprise smartphones and Chromebook laptops. We do know that the chip is an 8-core ARM processor with Google’s machine-learning technology, however – “a portion of its silicon will also be dedicated to improving the performance and ‘always-on’ capabilities of Google Assistant,” said Axios’s source.
Additionally, a user on Korea’s Clien forum (via About Chromebooks) has claimed that Whitechapel is essentially an Exynos processor, which makes sense, being that the CPU was co-developed by Samsung. Here are the purported specs:
- ARM octo-core SOC
- Dual-core A78 (not yet announced, likely based on “Hercules“)
- Dual-core A76
- Quad-core A55
- MP20 GPU built on ARM’s Borr architecture (unannounced)
- Google Visual Core and NPU (Neural Processing Unit)
- 5LPE process
The latest Pixel smartphones and laptops/slates are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 and Intel’s 7th/8th Gen processors, respectively. When Whitechapel comes to fruition, Google will be able to sidestep these companies and capitalize on the benefits of an in-house solution, which include lower costs and better integration between hardware and software.