The Pixel 8 series, expected to be unveiled in October, will be the first device to feature the Google Tensor 3 chipset. Tipster Kamila Wojciechowska revealed all the important details about the Tensor 3 SoC to Android Authority. The latter will initially be codenamed zuma and will feature a nine-core configuration of 1+4+4. This is made up of a Cortex-X3 Prime CPU core clocked at 3.0 GHz, four Cortex-A715 performance CPU cores clocked at 2.45 GHz and four Cortex-A510 efficiency CPU cores clocked at 2 .15 GHz exist. This configuration should help Tensor 3 track the performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, but it won’t be as powerful as the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and MediaTek’s next flagship smartphone chipset, given Arm’s recently announced Cortex-X4 Prime CPU core, the cortex, will benefit. A720 performance CPU core and the Cortex-A520 efficiency CPU core. According to Arm, the Cortex-X4 delivers 15% more performance with 40% less power consumption. The Tensor 3 will be able to equip the Pixel 8 line with Arm’s Memory Tagging Extensions (MTE), which help mitigate some memory-based attacks. And since the Tensor 3 will use Arm’s v9 architecture, Pixel 8 users can enjoy a pure 64-bit experience. The Tensor 3 will feature Arm’s Mali-G715 GPU, which may have 10 cores, as opposed to 7 on the Tensor 2’s Mali-G710 GPU. As a result, players may see more realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows thanks to Ray tracking.
We are now approaching the release of the third Google Tensor chipset
The Pixel 8 series gets an upgrade to Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 4.0 from UFS 3.1 used on the Pixel 7 series. UFS 4.0 is already used in the Galaxy S23 series and offers a sequential read speed of up to 4200 Mbit/s and a sequential write speed of up to 2800 Mbit/s. Compare that to sequential read speeds of up to 2100Mbps and sequential write speeds of up to 1200Mbps for UFS 3.1. Data transfer is faster and more energy efficient.
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We probably won’t see any change to the modem used on the Tensor 3. The Tensor 2 was upgraded to the Exynos Modem 5300 after the Pixel 6 series experienced severe connectivity issues with the Exynos Modem 5123 used with the first Tensor chipset. The Tensor 3 will use the Exynos Modem 5300, although it’s a different variant than the one used on last year’s Tensor SoC.
Finally, the Tensor 3 will feature a new version of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) AI accelerator. The chip, codenamed “Rio,” will run at 1.1GHz, compared to the 1.0GHz clock speed of its predecessor. Google claimed that the Tensor 2’s TPU is 60% faster for camera and voice tasks, so we could potentially see a significant improvement in AI capabilities this year.
