Last week, we exclusively reported that Google’s two phones for fall 2021 would run on a Google-made chip. Here’s everything we know about the Whitechapel GS101 chip that will be used in the Google Pixel 6.
First reported last year, “Whitechapel” is the codename for Google’s efforts to develop their own chips for smartphones, Chromebooks, and possibly more. Per our report last week, Google’s Whitechapel chips are set to make a debut later this year on the device we believe to be the Pixel 6. More specifically, this first chip is internally referred to as the “GS101,” but what do we actually know about the chip?
For starters, we know that Google has turned to Samsung’s system large-scale integration (SLSI) division for assistance with the design and manufacture of the GS101 and Whitechapel in general. As the SLSI division is also responsible for the Exynos chips used in Samsung phones outside of the US, we can assume that the Samsung Exynos and Google Whitechapel lines will have a lot in common at the beginning.
In the earliest rumors of Google’s Whitechapel, it was reported that the chip we now know as the GS101 would feature a three-cluster design with two Cortex-A78 cores, two Cortex-A76 cores, and four Cortex-A55 cores. Despite Whitechapel’s strong relationship to Exynos, there aren’t any Exynos chips that match this design.
Until recently, most smartphone chips followed the two-cluster “big.LITTLE” design, where a “cluster” of high-power processing cores are paired with a cluster of low-power ones. One of the goals of this design is to conserve power by running less demanding work on the low-power cores, thus increasing the battery life.
Leave a Reply