Over the weekend, UK retailer Carphone Warehouse posted an official-looking teaser website (which has since been taken down) for the Pixel 6. The positioning was full of information, most notably claiming that the Pixel 6 will include “5 years of updates.” The Pixel 6 options Google’s first foremost SoC, the “Google Tensor” chip, and the corporate hasn’t stated why it determined to drop Qualcomm and strike out by itself within the chip market. Google is not designing any customized CPU or GPU cores (although it’s getting artistic with the configuration), and it has solely alluded to a small handful of AI use-cases as promoting factors for the SoC.
We have lengthy speculated that Google’s chip plans are actually about extending Android’s assist timelines, permitting the corporate to raised compete with Apple, and now we lastly have affirmation. Apple is as much as six years of assist on the iPhone 6S, by the way in which.
The SoC vendor is presently the greatest barrier to longer-term assist. Qualcomm presently helps telephones for 3 main OS updates and 4 years of safety updates, which is matched by Samsung, and none of Qualcomm’s clients are empowered to assist telephones for for much longer. With the Tensor-equipped Pixel 6, Google has solely itself to reply to relating to the assist timeline. The corporate makes the OS, the cellphone {hardware}, and the cellphone SoC, so it may well assist the Pixel 6 for so long as it needs.
