[Android 0]

Credit: Joe Maring / Android Authority

Scouring the new Pixel 11 series for significant hardware changes this year, the biggest standout is the Tensor G6’s new and improved Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). Google says the Tensor G6’s TPU delivers 50% more compute power and up to 3.5x faster performance in some workloads. Impressive numbers, sure — but what does that actually mean when you pick up a Pixel 11?

For starters, let’s get to grips with what the TPU actually does. While Tensor’s CPU handles your apps and its GPU mostly handles games, the TPU is primarily tasked with number-crunching for machine learning workloads, featuring dedicated dot-product matrix math units and high-speed memory access. In other words, it’s the main AI processor inside Google’s Pixel handsets. It’s used for a wide variety of on-device tasks that don’t require the cloud, such as speech recognition, voice transcription, and text suggestions.