Stefan Mileschin

The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL had a secret Image Processing Unit (IPU) that none of us knew about until now: Google has just announced that both phones contain their first custom-designed System on Chip (SoC), called Pixel Visual Core. In the coming weeks and months, Google will enable the Pixel Visual Core to help bring the Pixel camera's HDR+ magic to third party camera apps. The goal here is to bring the Pixel 2's HDR+ smarts to others outside of the Google Camera app. The SoC will do so by taking advantage of its eight Google-designed custom cores that can deliver "over 3 trillion operations per second on a mobile power budget." By using the Pixel Visual Core, Google says that HDR+ can run 5x faster and at less than 1/10th the energy than if it was trying to through the application processor (like the Snapdragon 835 in these phones).

http://www.hardocp.com/news/2017/10/...vis ual_core/