If you’ve been keeping up with the Pixel news lately, you’re probably aware that a number of prototype units for both the vanilla Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro are already out in the wild. Google has generally done a good and quick job of tracking these down remotely and somehow “brickening” or disabling them, but that doesn’t stop tinkerers from poking around at what’s left as boot logs to excavate specifications.
A few more low-level details have now been excavated. Let’s start with the new in no particular order tensor 2 chipset† The new leak reaffirms that the Pixel 7 is custom GS201 chip will still use a 4+2+2 CPU core design and will also continue to use Cortex-A55 cores as evidenced by a specific fix in the boot logs. As far as we know from other leaks, the two “big” Cortex-X1 cores will also carry over from the original Tensor. The original design used old A76 cores instead of the latest Cortex-A78 (the last of the ARMv8 medium cores), which could ultimately be the only possible swap. That said, we still don’t know what Google has planned for the GPU and other hardware.
Google Pixel 7 Pro prototype live images
Speaking of other hardware, this isn’t the first time a new display panel for the Pixel 7 Pro has popped up. This new leak reaffirms that at least the particular prototype under investigation has a new Samsung Made S6E3HC4 Panel replacing the old S6E3HC3 in the Pixel 6. This panel change is probably the reason behind the increase in maximum brightness, as also reported by the software – 1,000 nits and 100% APL (whole screen is on), an increase from compared to the current 800 nits. The display’s resolution is expected to remain the same at 3,120 x 1,440 pixels, but now with an added native 1080p mode to potentially reduce power consumption.
Google Pixel 7 Pro
Other findings from the latest round of prototype log sniffing include a new Cirrus Logic CS40L26 chips for haptics that are apparently a generation newer than the ones in the Pixel 6 Pro. So we can probably expect better haptic feedback from the Pixel 7 Pro.
Finally, the STMicroelectronics ST54K NFC chip has now been swapped out for a simpler one ST21NFC, which no longer includes UWB functionality on the chip itself. That doesn’t mean UWB is gone from the Pixel 7 Pro, it’s just handled by a separate chip.
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