Google Pixel 2 includes a discrete, custom image processor

Prasad, 17 October 2017

A cool fact Google left out of its keynote and all promotional material is that both the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL devices will include a discrete, custom silicon for image processing duties.

This little system-on-chip or SoC will operate independently of the main Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset. It includes a single Cortex-A53 CPU core, eight Image Processing Unit or IPU cores and LPDDR4 memory, again, entirely separate from the main SoC and memory.

According to Google, once enabled, this chip will expedite image processing by 5x while using 1/10th the power compared to the main CPU.

The SoC is currently dormant and will be enabled by the upcoming Android 8.1 update.

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Reader comments

Nice try Google, better make sure it does what you say

  • Anonymous
  • 18 Oct 2017
  • NHr

HDR+ is trickery in the firmware, again, not necessary to use an image processor for that. The image processor is disabled currently remember, so the SD soc is doing the processing. So...eyeroll to you yes. Firmware does/can do a lot to manipulate th...

  • Steve Max
  • 18 Oct 2017
  • Fcn

Yes, they have. The 808 is MUCH faster at taking those 41MP images and downsampling them whem compared to the 1020, which is a much faster device in every other aspect; this is due to the discrete image processor in the 808.

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