Google Pixel Tablet Review: Two in One – That Little Bit Extra
It’s been years since Google launched a tablet. With the Pixel Tablet, Google is now making a new attempt.
Like the current Pixel phones, the Pixel Tablet is powered by Google’s second generation Tensor SoC. The eight-core CPU has two powerful cores (ARM Cortex-X) with a maximum clock frequency of 2.85 GHz. Four ARM Cortex-A78 cores with up to 2.35 GHz form the middle cluster. Two Cortex-A55s with a maximum of 1.8 GHz calculate as slow cores.
As with the Pixel phones, the Tensor architecture includes a titanium security chip and an AI unit (TPU, Tensor Processing Unit). A Mali-G710 MP7 is on board for the graphics.
Compared to other smartphones and tablets, the Pixel Tablet cannot always keep up with devices with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ and Apple’s current Bionic Socs. However, this does not have a negative impact in everyday use. The Pixel Tablet is easily fast enough for surfing, social media apps, AV streaming, and games.
We didn’t notice any jerks, lags, or long loading times either when using apps or on the Android interface itself. Compared to the Pixel 7/7 Pro and 7a, the Pixel Tablet is even a bit faster, which we didn’t initially expect given the same configuration.
The most likely explanation: Previous tests of the Pixel phones suggested that the Tensor heats up a little more than competing CPUs during compute-intensive tasks and starts to drop its clock speed accordingly earlier. The larger case apparently helps the Pixel Tablet to dissipate heat more effectively.
In the stress test with repeated benchmark runs, the Pixel tablet began to clock down the CPU later and less severely, so that the performance dropped less in the long run than in the Pixel phones.
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