It was reported last month that the forthcoming Google Pixel 6 may not feature a Snapdragon SoC. Instead, it is expected to house a Google-made chip, which is codenamed as “Whitechapel.” A fresh report by XDA Developers states new evidence has appeared to point that the Pixel 6 will be driven by the company’s in-house chip.
In the screenshot shared by the publication, the “Whitechapel” text can be seen in the URL mentioned by one of the Google engineers in a code change submitted to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP). The publication claims that the P21 mentioned by the engineer in the line “You don’t need coredomain to use binder_use. This one lives fine on P21,” could be referring to the Pixel 6. P21 may not be the Pixel 5a as it is expected to feature the Snapdragon 765G, which powered the Pixel 4a 5G last year.
In the URL, Whitechapel refers to Google’s own chip and “GS101” probably stands for Google Silicon. 9to5 Google had reported last month the Whitechapel chip could be under construction at Samsung’s system large-scale integration (SLSI) division. Since the SLSI is also responsible for the Exynos chips, speculations are rife that Google’s first chip will have some common features with Samsung Exynos.
Past reports have claimed that it could be a 5nm octa-core ARM chipset that may comprise of two Cortex-A78 CPU cores, two Cortex-A76 cores, and quad Cortex-A55 cores, and an ARM Mali GPU. The performance of the chip could be similar to the Snapdragon 7-series chips by Qualcomm.
By using its own chip, Google will possibly have better control over driver updates since it would not need to rely on Qualcomm. This means that the drivers can be compatible with newer Android OS versions for a longer time. At present, Pixel devices offer users 3 years of Android OS upgrades. However, having its own chip could allow Google to offer 4 or 5 generations of OS upgrades.
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