As Android the OS has evolved, so has the hardware that powers it. These days, smartphones come with high power and high efficiency CPUs paired with large amounts of RAM. Pretty much everyone buying a new phone these days has something that can perform extremely well. But still, people want to know what the fastest and bestest processor is, so benchmarks are used to help rank these things.
In a recent interview, Google’s Soniya Jobanputra (Google Pixel product management team) shared that being the fastest isn’t what Google’s goal is with Tensor. This isn’t news, but we do love getting a peek at Google’s thought process, especially as the company gets more involved in creating its own chipsets.
When we are designing the chip, we’re not designing it for speeds and feats. We’re not designing it to beat some specific benchmark that’s out there. We’re designing it to meet our use cases.
Anyone running a newer Pixel phone powered by a Tensor chip would likely surrender that while they aren’t the fastest phones on the block, they are plenty smooth and deliver more than enough to complete essentially any task. That’s the important part. Can they handle all of the AI tasks? Can they play the games you want to play? If you answered yes to that, then who cares how high they score on a benchmark?
One specific pain point Google wanted to address with the Tensor G4 is opening apps and the speed at which that action takes place.
We knew that we had a pain point with opening apps. And so as we built G4, we really focused on, okay, what do we need to do to make sure that experience is better for users.
As Pixel 9 units begin to hit the doorsteps of those who preordered, we’ll be curious to see the initial impressions from users. We obviously can’t share anything on that front yet ourselves, but we have high hopes for Pixel and Tensor in 2024 and beyond.