Pixel 6's Tensor Chip: Let's Talk!

 

Okay, so, I've held the Pixel 6. Let's talk about it. All right, so today we get a bunch of officially confirmed real details on the new Pixel 6, and Pixel 6 Pro coming up this year from Google. I got some very brief off camera hands-on time, okay, so I didn't get to shoot any of that, but I have a lot of details, and I have some official images that I can share with you. So, let's get into all of it.

 

So, like I said, there's a Pixel 6 and a Pixel 6 Pro. They're both pretty huge phones, but the Pixel 6 Pro is a little bigger, around 6.7 inches. It has glossy, metal rails instead of matte black rails, and it is slightly curved on the sides of the screen, it's 120 hertz screen instead of a flat 90 hertz on the smaller one. And there's also new camera hardware across both of them, with a shared primary and ultra-wide, but there's also a new 4x telephoto camera on the Pro. And they have this horizontal camera bar across the whole back of the phone, side to side, that honestly it looks better in person than it does with the renders. It kind of reminds me of Nexus 6P which also had a camera bar go all the way across the back, and you can actually notice the metal rails on top and bottom of the camera bar are again, glossy on the Pro and matte black on the non-Pro. Both upfront will have a hole punch selfie camera in the middle, and a nearly bezel-less display, and of course both run Android 12 with all the new aesthetics and Material UI, and all those features. So that's nice, and that's exciting, and there's a bunch more details to discuss closer to launch. Things like the exact battery size, the screen resolution, and of course, prices.

 

But the one thing I want to talk about that's across both of these phones is the new custom design silicon that will be in both of them called Google Tensor. So, this was rumored for a little bit. You know, Pixel phones for years had been using a variety of Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm, whatever's available, just like every other high end Android phone. But it was rumored that brewing in the background was this Whitechapel project of Google designing their own silicon to eventually go into the Pixel phone. This turned out to be true. So, there's a couple of different benefits to this, and it's not even a new idea completely. You know, obviously Apple designs all the chips in their iPhones, but also Huawei makes the Kirin chips, and Samsung makes Exynos chips. This is a thing that's been happening. And there's even been little bits of custom silicon inside Pixel phones before already. They'd had a custom image signal processor called the Pixel Visual Core and then Pixel Neural Core, and also the Titan M security chip. But this entire chip, this whole phone being powered by just a Tensor chip, well, that's a big deal. I think it's particularly important for the Pixel line specifically because of how much Google does with software and that optimization process, and I think we're going to see a lot of big changes here.

 

So, let's start with the biggest, most obvious place which is in their cameras. So, we all know by now that Pixels have had really good photo quality, specifically, for a couple of years now, and that's because of their awesome software and computational photography. But the video quality has always just been meh, like nothing special, pretty average from the Pixel. And so, what Google showed me on Pixel 6 was a comparison with the Pixel 6 and the iPhone 12 and the Pixel 5. And of course, this is a very handcrafted, tailored comparison to show the best thing that they can do, but they're basically taking all those computational photography chops and applying them to video, because Tensor enables that now. And it was really impressive what I was able to see. We'll see much more hands-on demos, of course, I'm sure very soon, but that's exciting. That's the HDR, that's the noise reduction, the stabilization, all of that smart in video now too. Also, you know, Pixel cameras have always been great, but since Pixel 2, they've basically been using the same kind of small at this point, sensor. Because they've got it so dialed with their algorithms, they can of course improve the glass and of course the Iris opening every year, but generally it's been the same sensor, and I suspect they were reluctant to change it because why move to some huge, new 50-megapixel sensor if you don't have the computational photography chops to back it up.

 

So, they've just been sticking with the same sensor, but this year with Pixel 6, it is all new sensors, big new sensors. And I'm really curious to see what kind of results we're going to get with Tensor and the image processing on these big, new sensors. Now, another benefit, and the other sort of main pillar one that Google was talking to me about was speech recognition. And basically, being able to do as much of this as possible on device as efficiently and quickly as possible. We all know Google Assistant is very important to them, and I use Assistant all the time, so I'm happy to hear this. But yeah, just being as dedicated as possible by literally giving parts of the Tensor chip that sole purpose of decoding speech into text, and making things like Assistant way faster. And speaking of power, I think battery life is another thing to keep an eye on with the Tensor chip in Pixel 6. So, I don't have official battery size numbers. If I get them from them, I'll put them on the screen here, but the point is, do you remember when the Macs switched from Intel design chips to Apple designed M1 chips and literally doubled in battery life? That's because of optimization and efficiency. I'm not saying we're going to get that insane level of gains here. They're still both ARM based. You know, Tensor and Qualcomm chips are already ARM based, so same architecture. But we are now approaching the same level of vertical integration that Apple has had with those Macs, so maybe it'll be a little better. I think the streamlining of power and efficiency with Tensor chips should make for a better battery experience.

 

But then on top of all that, now we got to think about Android in general, Google makes Android, they can optimize for everything, but also now they can offer much longer software updates. Much longer than other Android phones. As of right now, technically, Android phones can offer software updates as long as Qualcomm also officially supports those updates. So, typically you'll get something like three years, which is nice. But now that they control the entire stack, they can optimize Android for as many years as possible, and they want to. They want to optimize Android for as long as possible to continue giving you updates, because they want to keep you on that phone. I feel like we've seen this kind of from the other side, from the iPhone. Apple has made a lot of money from selling iPhones for a really long time. But that's slowed down a bit, and now people are keeping their iPhones longer than ever, so Apple realizes they want to make as much money from the person with that iPhone during the life cycle of that phone as possible. So, you've seen them move into services. Apple TV, Apple News, all these services you can buy and pay monthly, and then that iPhone that you have for a long time will make Apple a lot of money. So, with the Pixel, Google already makes a majority of their money from ad services from things like Gmail and Google Search and Google Assistant. And so now, Tensor just enables them the ability to guarantee way longer software updates to keep you using that device way longer like the iPhone.

 

Now, if you really want to go into the weeds, I think this could also have an effect on pricing. At least internally, I don't want to get too crazy with it. But Google has had to bargain with Qualcomm to get a certain price for a certain order size for a certain number of chips. But then, Samsung might come along and place like a way bigger order which could affect the supply of certain chips, and the whole supply chain's out of their control. So, with Tensor, it's better for Google to have more control over this. But, obviously... Maybe not obviously, but Qualcomm has to bargain with their foundry and get certain prices, and eventually upsell to OEMs like Google. So, cutting out that middle man of Qualcomm can actually save them money, and make the price overall lower, especially at scale. And I don't know, this might not get passed down to the user at any point, maybe they'll use those savings for something else, but it's just one more advantage to this. But you know what, actually, one more thing just came to mind. This could be the beginning of an ecosystem wide silicon thing for Google. You know, the same way, I keep going back to Apple's example, but the same way that M1 chip we've talked so much about is basically a scaled-up version of the A14, I feel like there could be a scaled up or scaled down version of Tensor in Google's future. Maybe a scaled down version for a Pixel Watch someday, or a scaled-up version for a Chromebook, or really any other device, or a Smart Speaker, or something like that, or a Smart Display, that would just make sense to happen down the line.

 

So, yeah, and that also makes sense for future parity because now, you know, the same reason the M1 Macs have better webcam quality than any other Mac ever is because they're using the same image processing as the iPhone. So, for all of this, I guess what I'm trying to say here is the first generation of Tensor chip we're about to see in the Pixel is going to be really interesting to see what it unlocks, to see how it performs. Obviously in regular day-to-day, people are going to benchmark it and all that fun stuff, but to see what type of stuff it really unlocks for the Pixel now and then in future generations too. So, something to keep an eye on.