Pixel Visual Core is the name of the new technology and it will be made available with the released of Android 8.1

Oct 18, 2017 07:10 GMT  ·  By

Google has implemented a co-processor in its Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL phones that will significantly improve the quality of the images when it’s activated.

Surprisingly, when Google announced the new Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL phones they didn’t say anything about having a secret processor that will be used to improve the quality of the images. Furthermore, the early tests made with the camera on those phone already revealed that it’s the best one of the market.

The new technology is called the Pixel Visual Core, and it’s Google’s first attempt at delivering a hardware solution. The companies’ approach until now has been a software one, and that’s obvious from the quality of the photos taken with Pixel 2. It seems that it’s no longer sufficient, so now they have implemented a dedicated processor for HDR+.

Pixel Visual Core in Pixel 2
Pixel Visual Core in Pixel 2

The custom eight-core processor is a beast

Google didn’t just contract a third-party company for a mobile CPU, they actually built it themselves. It’s custom hardware that’s designed with only one purpose, and that is to improve the quality of the images.

“With eight Google-designed custom cores, each with 512 arithmetic logic units (ALUs), the IPU delivers raw performance of more than 3 trillion operations per second on a mobile power budget. Using Pixel Visual Core, HDR+ can run 5x faster and at less than one-tenth the energy than running on the application processor (AP),” says Google in their official announcement.

The key aspect of this new processor is that it’s not meant to replace the Snapdragon solution, but to complement it. The most important reason to have this new processor, besides the obvious gain in image quality is that it should use a lot less battery power, which is crucial on phones.

Machine learning is the future

Google is one of the many companies that’s trying to make use of this new machine learning technology. It’s a new way for devices to interpret what the camera is looking and to adjust the images without the need for specific programming.

Of course, it’s something that needs processing power, and this is precisely where the new Pixel Visual Core comes into play. Pixel 2 already takes some fantastic photos, but they should improve tremendously after the new technology is activated in the coming weeks, with the release of Android 8.1.

For starters, only the HDR+ will be able to make use of the hidden processor, but it will be enabled for other apps are based on Android’s camera API.

Better image processing
Better image processing

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Pixel 2 by Google
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