The Google Tensor G5 mobile processor for the Pixel 10 series smartphones promises to be special: Google has for the first time refused to cooperate with Samsung and developed it on its own. The processor will be manufactured by TSMC using a 3 nm process technology. The authors of the Android Authority resource managed to find out the main characteristics of the platform and draw the appropriate conclusions.
The most important components of a modern mobile single-chip platform are the central and graphic processors. For the new chip, Google again licensed the central processor cores from Arm, as it did for the previous Tensors. But in the new product, unlike chips of previous generations, Google abandoned Arm Mali graphics in favor of the Imagination Technologies DXT accelerator.
The Tensor G5 inherits several components of Google’s own design from previous chips: the AoC audio processor, the Emerald Hill hardware memory compression unit, the TPU artificial intelligence accelerator, and the GXP (Google Xtensa Processor) digital signal processor on licensed Tensillica Xtensa cores, which is used for certain workloads, including image processing.
Previous Google Tensor chips used two video codecs: Google’s own BigWave for AV1 and Samsung’s MFC (Multi Format Codec) for other formats. It would be logical to assume that Google would continue to use its own development and even expand it to other formats, but instead the company decided to use a third-party ready-made solution – Chips&Media WAVE677DV for encoding and decoding AV1, VP9, HEVC and H.264 video at up to 4K resolution and 120 frames per second.
The standard Samsung Exynos DPU has been replaced by a VeriSilicon DC9000 display controller. Camera image processing has been completely stripped of Samsung’s design blocks, with Google components now used throughout the entire cycle; the company has also installed its own memory controller, system cache (GSLC), clocking and power management modules. Many core interfaces, including USB, PCIe, I3C, physical layer controller (PHY) for interfaces such as the mobile display interface (DSI), DisplayPort, and LPDDR5x memory controller, are licensed from third parties, primarily Synopsys.
Thus, the refusal of Samsung’s services did not lead to any consequences for Google – the company had been actively using third-party developers’ blocks in its chips before. As a result, Tensor G5, in addition to the transfer to the TSMC process technology, will not receive significant differences from chips of previous generations, except in terms of graphics. The partnership with Samsung helped the American company develop and test its own components, and now Google is ready to continue working independently.
Google’s Tensor G5 chip will debut with the Pixel 10 smartphones, which are expected to launch this fall.