Advertisement
Overseas phones from Samsung use its own Exynos chips, but Qualcomm largely has a monopoly on phones in the U.S. A homegrown chip from Google would be a major break and could lead to a renaissance for the Pixel, which has struggled to gain traction. Apple has been making its own smartphone chips since the iPhone 4 and it gives its handsets a huge speed and power efficiency advantage over Android phones.
This wouldn’t be Google’s first crack at a smartphone chip. It already makes a Tensor Processing Unit for AI cloud-based tasks as well as a smartphone version called the Pixel Neural Core. It also made an ISP called Pixel Visual Core for the Pixel 2 and Pixel 3, but those tasks are now handled by the PNC. The Pixel 4 also included motion sensing made possible by the Soli chip but was discontinued with the Pixel 5.