Google is trying to play catch up to Apple’s crucial advantage in the mobile market: it designs and builds its own custom ARM-based chips for its mobile computing products. Microsoft set down a similar path, building its SQ1 chip and custom ARM-based chips to decrease its reliance on chipmaker Qualcomm.
Axios reported that Google is aiming to build its own eight-core ARM-based chips to power its flagship mobile phones, the Pixel series.
The company may even introduce its own custom-built eight-core ARM-based chips into its Chromebook line of products.
Though Google has refused to publicly comment on the matter, “Whitechapel” is the codename of the project, and it was developed with a helping hand from Samsung. Samsung phones run on Android, and the relationship between Google and Samsung is well established, so this seems plausible. Google certainly has the cash to burn on large projects that may eventually end up shelved or scrapped altogether.
But this isn’t Google’s first rodeo in custom chipmaking for its hardware products. The Pixel 4 has an in-house custom coprocessor called the Neural Core, which helps the Pixel 4 run machine learning operations. And both the Pixel 2 and 3 smartphones came with Pixel Visual Core, which functioned as a proxy processor to help crunch imaging tasks for efficient performance and energy conservation. Several Pixel smartphones also feature a custom security chip designed by Google called the Titan M (which came with a $1.5 million dollar bounty for anyone who can compromise its ability to protect critical user data).
Bottom Line
According to the report, most of the “Whitechapel” processor would be optimized to run Google’s machine learning technology, and a small portion of the chip would be dedicated toward improving Google Assistant’s performance.
Qualcomm would be the hardest hit if the report about Google’s “Whitechapel” project turned out to be true and if it were well executed. The company provides the current mobile processor for Google’s Pixel smartphones. But Apple’s A series chips are apparently too good for Google to ignore.