The “Google Silicon” team gives us a tour of the Pixel 6’s Tensor SoC

Enlarge / A promo image for the Google Tensor SoC. (credit: Google)

The Pixel 6 is official, with a wild new camera design, incredible pricing, and the new Android 12 OS. The headline component of the device has to be the Google Tensor "system on chip" (SoC), however. This is Google's first main SoC in a smartphone, and the chip has a unique CPU core configuration and a strong focus on AI capabilities.

Since when is Google a chip manufacturer, though? What are the goals of Tensor SoC? Why was it designed in its unique way? To get some answers, we sat down with members of the “Google Silicon” team—a name I don’t think we’ve heard before.

Google Silicon is a group responsible for mobile chips from Google. That means the team designed previous Titan M security chips in the Pixel 3 and up, along with the Pixel Visual Core in the Pixel 2 and 3. The group has been working on main SoC development for three or four years, but it remains separate from the Cloud team’s silicon work on things like YouTube transcoding chips and Cloud TPUs.