Stefan Mileschin

Whitechapel Development nearly done

Google has made significant progress toward developing its own processor to power future versions of its Pixel smartphone as soon as next year — and eventually Chromebooks.

According to Axios, the chip, code-named Whitechapel, was designed in cooperation with Samsung, whose state-of-the-art 5-nanometer technology would be used to manufacture the chips, according to a source familiar with Google's effort. Samsung has also manufactured Apple's iPhone chips, as well as its own Exynos processors. For those who came in very late, Whitechapel was the scene of the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888 so we are not sure who Google wants to gut by releasing it. The move could be a blow for Qualcomm, which supplies processors for many current high-end phones, including the Pixel.

Google has received its first working versions of the chip. However, the Google-designed chips aren't expected to be ready to power Pixel phones until next year. Subsequent versions of Google's chip could power Chromebooks, but that's likely to be even further off.

In addition to an 8-core ARM processor, Whitechapel will also include hardware optimized for Google's machine-learning technology. A portion of its silicon will also be dedicated to improving the performance and "always-on" capabilities of Google Assistant, the source said.

Google has been gradually building its semiconductor capabilities. The Pixel already includes custom Google chips for machine learning and image processing tasks, and the company has hired a number of chip experts from rivals, including Apple and Intel.

https://fudzilla.com/news/mobile/506...chip-for-pixel