The impending Pixel 7 series has received very little information from Google, but we do know that working prototypes already exist—one of them even turned up on eBay. The Google News Telegram group utilised another such prototype, a bricked Pixel 7 Pro, to discover further information about the new models.

The team was able to obtain boot logs even though the phone was bricked. They looked through those and found the Tensor 2 chipset had Cortex-A55 processors. The new design (A510) is based on ARMv9, and this is the final little core based on ARMv8 architecture. The additional CPU cores are similarly outdated ARMv8 designs since the two architectures cannot coexist on a single chipset.

The logs also showed that the Tensor 2 will keep its two plus two plus four core CPU arrangement. Two Cortex-X1 cores, two Cortex-A76 cores, and four A55 cores were on the original Tensor chip. The two X1 and the A55s will undoubtedly remain in place, while the new X2 core is an ARMv9 chip. Since the initial design utilised outdated A76 cores rather than the most recent Cortex-A78 cores, there is still a chance for new medium cores (the last of the ARMv8 medium cores).

This means that, at least in terms of CPU-bound tasks, we cannot anticipate any significant performance increases from the Tensor 2 chipset. When the first Tensor was released last year, it wasn’t the quickest chip on the market; this year, the difference will be even more noticeable.

Despite this, we are still unsure of Google’s plans for the GPU and other hardware. One of Google’s trump cards is image processing, which is handled by the ISP and TPU (Tensor Processing Unit).

The prototype device, however, also included a brand-new Samsung S6E3HC4 display panel. The S6E3HC3 display of the Pixel 6 Pro will likely be replaced by this, although once more, we anticipate just slight improvements in the resolution and refresh rate.