Pixel 6's Tensor Chip: Let's Talk!

[Music] okay so uh i've held the pixel six let's talk about it all right so today we get a bunch of officially confirmed real details on the new pixel 6 and pixel 6 pro coming up this year from google i got some very brief off-camera hands-on time okay so i didn't get to shoot any of that but i have a lot of details and i have some official images that i can share with you so let's get into all of it so like i said there's a pixel 6 and a pixel 6 pro they're both pretty huge phones but the pixel 6 pro is a little bigger around 6.7 inches it has glossy metal rails instead of matte black rails and it is slightly curved on the sides of the screen it's 120 hertz screen instead of a flat 90 hertz on the smaller one there's also new camera hardware across both of them with a shared primary and ultra wide but there's also a new 4x telephoto camera on the pro and they have this horizontal camera bar across the whole back of the phone side to side that honestly it looks better in person than it does with the renders it kind of reminds me of a nexus 6p which also had a camera bar go all the way across the back and you can actually notice uh the metal rails on top and bottom of the camera bar are again glossy on the pro and matte black on the non-pro both up front will have a hole punch selfie camera in the middle and a nearly bezel-less display and of course both run android 12 with all the new aesthetics and material u and all those features so that's nice and that's exciting and there's a bunch more details to discuss closer to launch things like the exact battery size the screen resolution and of course prices but the one thing i want to talk about that's across both of these phones is the new custom designed silicon that will be in both of them called google tensor so this was rumored for a little bit you know pixel phones for years have been using a variety of snapdragon chips from qualcomm whatever's available just like every other high-end android phone but it was rumored that brewing in the background was this white chapel project of google designing their own silicon to eventually go into the pixel phone this turned out to be true so there's a couple different benefits to this and it's not even a new idea completely you know obviously apple designs all the chips in their iphones but also huawei makes the kirin chips and samsung makes exynos chips this is the thing that's been happening and there's even been little bits of custom silicon inside pixel phones before already they had a custom image signal processor called the pixel pixel visual core and then pixel neural core and also the the titan m security chip but this entire chip this whole phone being powered by just a tensor chip well that's a big deal i i think it's particularly important for the pixel line specifically because of how much google does with software and and that optimization process and i think i think we're going to see a lot of big changes here so let's start with the biggest i think most obvious place which is in their cameras so we all know by now that pixels have had really good photo quality specifically for a couple years now and that's because of their awesome software and computational photography but the video quality has always just been meh like not nothing special pretty average from the pixel and so what google showed me on pixel 6 was a comparison with the pixel 6 and the iphone 12 and the pixel 5. and of course this is a very you know handcrafted tailored comparison to show the best thing they could do but they're basically taking all those computational photography chops and applying them to video because tensor enables that now and it was really impressive what i was able to see we'll see much more hands-on demos of course i'm sure very soon but that's exciting that's the hdr that's the noise reduction the stabilization all of that smarts in video now too also you know pixel cameras have always been great but since pixel 2 they've basically been using the same kind of small at this point sensor because they've got it so dialed with their algorithms they can of course improve the glass and of course the iris opening every year but generally it's been the same sensor and i suspect they were reluctant to change it because why move to some huge new 50 megapixel sensor if you don't have the computational photography chops to back it up so they've just been sticking with the same sensor but this year with pixel 6 it is all new sensors big new sensors and i'm really curious to see what kind of results we're going to get with tensor and the image processing on these big new sensors now another benefit and the other sort of main pillar one that google was talking to me about was speech recognition and basically being able to do as much of this as possible on device as efficiently and quickly as possible beyond the google assistant is very important to them and i use assistant all the time so i'm happy to hear this but yeah just being as dedicated as possible by literally giving parts of the tensor chip that sole purpose of decoding speech into text and making things like assistant way faster and speaking of power i think battery life is another thing to keep an eye on with the tensor chip in pixel six so i don't have official battery size numbers if i get them from them i'll put them on the screen here but the point is do you remember when the max switched from intel design chips to apple designed m1 chips and literally doubled in battery life that's because of optimization and efficiency i'm not saying we're going to get that insane level of games here they're still both arm based you know tensor and qualcomm chips already arm based so same architecture but we are now approaching the same level of vertical integration that apple has had with those macs so maybe it'll be a little better i think the the streamlining of power and efficiency with tensor chips should make for a better battery experience but on top of all that now we got to think about you know android in general google makes android they can optimize for everything but also now they can offer much longer software updates much longer than other android phones as of right now technically you know android phones can offer software updates as long as qualcomm also officially supports those updates so typically you'll get something like three years which is nice but now that they control the entire stack they can optimize android for as many years as possible and they want to they want to optimize android for as long as possible to continue giving you updates because they want to keep you on that phone i feel like we've seen this kind of from the other side from the iphone apple has made a lot of money from selling iphones for a really long time but that slowed down a bit and now people are keeping their iphones longer than ever so apple realizes they they want to make as much money from the person with that iphone during the life cycle of that phone is possible so you've seen them move into services apple tv apple news all these services you can buy and pay monthly and then that iphone that you have for a long time will make apple a lot of money so with the pixel google already makes a majority of their money from ad services from things like gmail and google search and google assistant and so now tensor just enables them the ability to guarantee way longer software updates to keep you using that device way longer like the iphone now if you really want to go uh into the weeds i think this could also have an effect on pricing at least internally i don't want to get too crazy with it but google has had to to bargain with qualcomm to you know get a certain price for a certain order size for a certain number of chips but then samsung might come along and place like a way bigger order which could affect like the supply of certain ships and the whole supply chain is out of their control so with tensor it's it's better for google to have more control over this but obviously uh maybe not obviously but qualcomm has to bargain with their foundry and get certain prices and eventually upsell to oems like google so cutting out that middleman of qualcomm can actually save them money and make the price overall lower especially at scale and i don't know you know this might not get passed down to the user at any point maybe they use those savings for something else but it's just one more advantage to this but you know what actually one more thing i just came to mind this could be the beginning of an ecosystem-wide silicon thing for google you know the same way i keep going back to apple's example but the same way that m1 chip we've talked so much about is basically it's a scaled up version of the a14 i feel like there could be a scaled up or scaled down version of tensor in google's feature maybe a scaled down version for a pixel watch someday or a scaled up version for a chromebook or really any other device or a smart speaker or something like that or a smart display that would just make sense to happen down the line so yeah and that also makes sense for future parody because now you know the same reason the m1 max have better webcam quality than any other mac ever it's because they're using the same image processing as the iphone so for all of this i guess what i'm trying to say here is the first generation of tensor chip we're about to see in the pixel it's going to be really interesting to see what it unlocks to see how it performs obviously in regular day-to-day people are going to benchmark it and all that fun stuff but to see what type of stuff it really unlocks for the pixel now and then in future generations too so something to keep an eye on if you want to see uh my full video on android 12 and all the features that are already coming to the pixel when this phone comes out later this year i'll link that below like button if you want to check it out but that's been it for me just some quick thoughts on pixel six which is coming up coming up along with a bunch of other stuff if you want to be subscribed to see that of course you should thanks for watching catch you in the next one peace [Music]

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 3,895,790

Keywords: Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Tensor, Pixel 6 tensor, Google Tensor, tensor chip, MKBHD, Pixel 6 preview, Pixel 6 Pro preview

Id: 7hEPj13PUGc

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Dislexicpotato]

Man I really hope this phone delivers, currently using the iPhone XS Max and really want Google to pop off with these phones I need a new phone asap

[u/CeramicCastle49]

Biggest miss is the difference in camera specs. My brother has a note 20 ultra and the zoom is amazing on it. Would hate to go without a zoom lens but that's life, still look like excellent phones.

[u/the_gchart]

So... all of the renders and Material You videos I've seen show 09:30 on the clock. September 30th release date?

[u/ElGuano]

I'd like to get back to Pixel. I went from a 4XL to an S20FE, and while there are plusses to the Samsung, the camera is a tad slow, and pictures of people are WAY worse than with the Pixel. I had no idea how wide the gap was. Since most of my pictures are of my kids/family, this is probably the one thing I really miss about the Pixel, and it's enough to bring me back if the 6 Pro is everything it's supposed to be.

[u/[deleted]]

Instant buy.

[u/[deleted]]

Hopefully this phone will be the one I can finally upgrade too from my S9.

Please no overheating(SD888) and hopefully decent battery life since they got some folks working on it that know their stuff in terms of optimization. Doesn't have to be the fastest or the highest benchmark results. Those things are barely noticeable in RL performance.

[u/sciolycaptain]

I'm a little bummed to hear that the XL will have the rounded glass at the screen edges. Thats my least favorite "premium" phone trope. Distorts the screen and makes applying screen protectors more difficult.

[u/Buht_Secks]

Daddy needs to replace his 2 xl.

Can't wait.

[u/errsta]

MKBHD so good at this. Whatever actually comes of Tensor, he'll give it a fair shake in his detailed review.