Google wants to dump Qualcomm, launch smartphone SoC as early as next year

(credit: Ron Amadeo/Intel)

A new report from Axois claims that Google has "made significant progress toward developing its own processor to power future versions of its Pixel smartphone" and that a Google-made SoC could debut in a phone as early as next year. Google is apparently teaming up with Samsung, which is providing design support and manufacturing for the project, codenamed "Whitechapel."

The report says the Google SoC is an eight-core ARM processing with hardware "optimized for Google's machine learning technology" and the always-on capabilities of the Google Assistant. The chip would be built at Samsung's foundries on the firm's upcoming 5nm process, and in addition to being aimed at the Pixel, the report says that "subsequent versions" of the chip could be used in Chromebooks.

Google has been building custom smartphone silicon for a while now. It debuted a custom camera SoC—not a main system SoC—in the Pixel 2, called the "Pixel Visual Core" which was built in collaboration with Intel. The Pixel 3 and 4 have had similar photography-focused chips, now called the "Pixel Neural Core." Since the Pixel 3, the phones have had Google's "Titan M" security module, an isolated chip that handles the phone's verified boot and cryptographic key storage. In the Pixel 4, there's also Project Soli, a radar system that was shrunken down to a tiny piece of silicon. You can see how Google building its own system SoC could be a natural step after all this other silicon work. The company has been hiring chip designers from Intel and Qualcomm for some time now.

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