Google's Tensor chipsets have been the subject of controversy in the past. The first Tensor was power-hungry, thermally inefficient, and overall just a sub-par chip that immediately felt dated to many when it launched. Tensor G2 was a minor improvement, all things considered, but it did go a long way to fix some of those problems. Now, Tensor G3 is here, along with the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, and it's more than just an iterative change.

Google hasn't just updated a set of cores and bumped up frequencies; the entire chip has been remade with new cores altogether, which was desperately needed. There's now a single Cortex-X3 core, four Cortex A720 cores, and four Cortex A510 cores.

• 1x Cortex-X3 core
• 4x Cortex-A720 cores
• 4x Cortex-A510 cores
• 1x Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)
• 1x Low-power “Context Hub”
• 1x Titan security chip
• 1x Image Signalling Processor (ISP)
• Exynos 5300 modem
• 1x ARM Mali G715 MP07

Tensor G3 retains many ties to Exynos, and from what we can gather, this appears to be a very similar SoC to what was purported to be the Exynos 2300 in leaks earlier this year. It was also purported to have a nona-core layout that matches what was in the G3, though it likely would not have had Mali graphics.

Google is clearly trying to tame Tensor's heat aggressively when it comes to the CPU, and what it does with all of these changes seems to be working out. It's only under sustained loads that I noticed severe pre-emptive throttling.

Power draw and sustained CPU/GPU performance

Google is scared of heat

Google's Tensor chips have long been accused of overheating, and to be fair, they do tend to get very hot. While the Pixel 8 Pro can get quite toasty, we identified a very aggressive CPU frequency scaler to combat this, so much so that the phone's performance drops off a cliff quite quickly from our testing when under a sustained computational load.

As a primer, Tensor G3 has one prime core at 3GHz, four performance cores at 2.45GHz, and four efficiency cores at 2.15GHz. We tested the device using CPU Throttling Test, and discovered that under a minute later, when the battery hit 32 degrees Celsius, those frequencies dropped to 1.9GHz for the primary core, 1.4GHz for the performance cores, and 1.4GHz for the efficiency cores. That is a massive drop-off. While it's capable of some pretty good CPU performance at peak, Google really kills it as soon as things heat up.

In the above, you can see that CPU Throttling Test's speed drops off a lot after a minute, but maintains consistency thereafter.

We also tested with Burnout Benchmark to measure the power consumed by Tensor G3 in the Pixel 8 Pro. When we tested the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 initially, we spoke with developer Andrey Ignatov to get a sense of how the app works. He told us to run the app with a fully charged device on the lowest brightness and with airplane mode enabled, so all the data collected here is under those conditions. Ignatov told us the following tests are run on different components of the SoC as part of the Burnout Benchmark:

• GPU: Parallel vision-based computations using OpenCL
• CPU: Multi-threaded computations largely involving Arm Neon instructions
• NPU: AI models with typical machine learning ops

To combat temperature concerns, we ran these tests in a fridge. To make it a fair comparison, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 device was also tested in a fridge.

We start by seeing that Tensor G3 uses significantly less power than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which is initially a good sign. Even in CPU capabilities, Tensor G3 isn't too far behind the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, scoring only 16% behind its peak FPS. The median isn't great but not too far behind, with Tensor G3 scoring an FPS of 5.6 to the 9.5 FPS of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.

The good things for Tensor G3 stop there, though, as in GPU, it's absolutely no contest. Qualcomm wipes the floor with Google here, and it's crazy by how much. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 peaked of 27.47FPS, which is a 30% increase over the 21.11 FPS of Tensor G3. That's in peak performance, too. In median performance, Tensor G3 does even worse. With a 9.5 FPS median versus the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2's astounding 27.1 FPS median, it's simply no contest.

Overall, while Tensor G3 is great in general usage, it's certainly no world-beater when it comes to raw CPU or GPU performance.

Gaming and graphics

Still quite behind

The Google Pixel 8 Pro manages to maintain a fairly consistent speed in 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme test, which matches up with what we saw in Burnout Benchmark. While the score is considerably lower than we would see on other devices, it stayed remarkably consistent throughout the testing. It has Arm's Mali G715 in tow, not an Immortalis GPU as originally suspected. It's a bit of a weird omission, as Immortalis GPUs have more cores and ray-tracing support, but it seems that Google felt neither was necessary.

Speed-wise, Google went with UFS 3.1 and not UFS 4.0 for the Pixel 8 series. It's more than good enough for basically anything like gaming, app launching, and anything else that could be bottlenecked by slower storage speed, but it's still weird to use last-generation storage hardware. Given that the Pixel 8 series also starts with 128GB of storage (and Samsung's UFS 4 modules only start at 256GB) I can't help but wonder if that's related.

App launching speeds

Nothing out of the ordinary

We created an in-house app launch speed test script using Android’s ActivityManager shell interface to measure how long it takes for the main Activity of nine applications — Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Messages, Photos, Play Store, Slack, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube — to launch from a cold start (when not in memory). We launched these nine activities for 10 iterations (and killed each app between launches) to reduce the variance.

All apps launch very quickly, and the phone is a joy to use. I had no issues flicking between apps and didn't notice stuttering or other problems.

In contrast to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, the Google Pixel 8 Pro keeps up just fine. In most instances, it's in the tens of milliseconds slower than the Galaxy S23 Ultra, but otherwise, it keeps up just fine and is even faster in some other apps.

Final thoughts

Tensor is getting better, but it's still outclassed

I absolutely love my Pixel 8 Pro. The features are excellent, the design is wonderful, and the pictures it takes are phenomenal. I'm not much of a mobile gamer, but I am a power user, and I've found that it lasts me more than a day while being capable of keeping up with everything that I put it through.

Having said that, if you're a gamer or live in a hot climate, then the Pixel 8 Pro might not be for you. I live in Ireland, which is typically cold, wet, and rainy, and the Pixel 8 Pro manages to maintain its performance completely fine on an average day when the maximum ambient temperature has been 17 degrees Celsius. If you want a new smartphone just for playing games and emulating all of your favorite older titles, then the Pixel 8 is not for you.

We'll see how Pixel 8 Pro users fare in the summer months, and we're just glad to see Google improving its own SoCs, and the Tensor G3 is a great change to an already excellent smartphone line.