Comment: Tensor G2 needs to work on heat and battery life above all else for Pixel 7

Ben Schoon | Sep 8 2022 - 6:16 am PT

Google’s next Pixel finally has a launch date. The Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro will debut on October 6, and they’ll bring the Tensor G2 chip along with them. While Tensor’s first generation left a lot of room for improvement, it’s energy efficiency and heat generation that needs the most attention this time around.

The original Google Tensor chipset was Google’s very first mobile chip, and it put on a pretty good show at first. Google’s design was admittedly very much based on Samsung’s Exynos foundation, but the company’s choice to focus on AI strength over raw performance clearly didn’t hurt the final package.

But over time, it’s become clear where Google’s chip struggles to keep up with the competition.

In my own experience, I’ve had very little to complain about with Tensor, at least up until I upgraded to the Galaxy Z Fold 4, which really put Tensor’s problems front and center. My Pixel 6 Pro ran toe to toe with the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and its Snapdragon 888, and really I could barely tell the difference in day-to-day use with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in the Galaxy S22 series. There are some hiccups here or there, but on the whole, I was really happy with it.

The two things that I’ve really felt, though, have been heat and battery life.

Over the months since our review of the Pixel 6 Pro, I’ve noticed that battery life has been cut quite a lot. Where I could last a full day back at launch, the Pixel 6 Pro feels as though it consistently needs a charge by dinner time each day, especially if I spend a lot of time on a cellular network versus just using Wi-Fi. A big culprit for the battery drain is the modem, which has been proven to be quite a bit behind competitors, and it seems to suck up more power in order to keep its signal.

Another side effect of Tensor’s deficiencies is heat. While it wasn’t much of a problem over my local North Carolina autumn, winter, and spring, the summer heat really showed how much the Pixel 6 Pro struggles to stay cool. Any time I was out in the sun, keeping the phone cool was harder than keeping myself cool. Often, I’d sit the phone alongside a bottle of water in my bag when playing disc golf just to keep it from overheating. And there were far too many times that I noticed the Pixel becoming hot to the touch, to the point where I could feel the heat through my pockets as I would walked around on a hot day.

That heat really stood out compared to every other phone I’ve tried over the summer months. The OnePlus 10T kept consistently cool, as did Samsung’s latest foldables, and even my Fold 3 from last year managed to never get nearly as hot as the Pixel did over the past few months.

oneplus 10t and pixel 6 pro — *Even in the dead heat of NYC in August, the OnePlus 10T kept cool*

Tensor seems to be the biggest culprit here as, generally speaking, the processor is the part of a phone that generates the most heat. Dissipation is the key to keeping a phone cool, but other chips have improved their overall efficiency to cut down on the generation of that heat in the first place.

Of course, there’s only so much Google can do to solve these problems. Much of the blame lies on the Samsung foundry that produces the original Tensor chip and will continue to produce Tensor G2.

For proof of that, we can look to a couple of places. For one, Exynos chips have been tied to heat issues in the past. The Galaxy S20 Ultra’s Exynos variant had many overheating problems, and devices in that same era even led fans to petition Samsung to stop using the chips.

Further, Qualcomm proved how much of a difference a chip can have when it’s made by Samsung or by the other main player, TSMC. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was produced under Samsung’s lead, and it was a pretty solid chip on the whole. But just a few months later, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 hit the scene, and it was a massive improvement across the board, despite being virtually the same chip on a design level. The biggest gain was with battery life, thanks to better power efficiency, which Qualcomm claimed could boost overall endurance by around 30%. Based on our time with the Galaxy Z Fold 4, which has the same battery size and virtually the same displays as the Fold 3, all signs certainly pointed towards Qualcomm’s chip being the main enhancement for the foldable’s endurance, and it really all came down to the switch to TSMC’s much more efficient build.

In reality, Google is probably years away from coming anywhere close to what Qualcomm has managed. Not even MediaTek, which uses the same TSMC production as Qualcomm now does, can fully match a top-tier Snapdragon. Plus, Tensor “G3” is already rumored to be in the works with Samsung still at the foundation.

But still, it’s clear to us that this is one of the biggest areas Google needs to catch up on. The Pixel 6 series pretty much matched up with Snapdragon-powered flagships in terms of day-to-day performance, but continued problems with heat and battery life really take the experience down a notch. Tensor G2 is the first step in Google’s chance to close the gap.