The Pixel 6 series will be the first to debut Google's in-house silicon codenamed Whitechapel

Last year, we heard about Google working on its first-ever in-house ARM chipset codenamed 'GS101' Whitechapel, where the GS probably stands for Google Silicon. Samsung was allegedly developing the 5nm SoC, that would run two Cortex-A78, two Cortex-A76 and four Cortex-A55 cores, along with an unnamed twenty-core GPU. 9to5Google has now received word that the Google Pixel 6 series will run the mystery SoC.

The report also states that there will be two Google Pixel 6 variants this time around codenamed 'Raven' and 'Oriole'. Both devices are slated to be launched together sometime this fall. All of these devices are part of a larger platform called 'Slider'. Chromebooks powered by Whitechapel silicon are a possibility, although we don't know anything about them just yet. The success of Apple's M1 chip seems to have driven Samsung to develop its first-ever laptop-grade chipset too, so it only stands to reason that Google does the same.

Google's foray into the custom SoC field should be interesting, to say the least. It will allow for higher Apple-esque control over its ecosystem and some micro-optimizations that were impossible on Qualcomm silicon. Whitechapel's core configuration makes it abundantly clear that it cannot trade blows with the Snapdragon 888 or Exynos 2100, once again relegating the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 XL (tentative) to the mid-range category.We're probably looking at an Exynos 1080 level of performance, at best.

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