Google Whitechapel confirmed: will the Pixel 2021 feature Google's own SoC?
Reading tea leaves in Android's source code: a Googler’s comment seems to confirm the name and launch of the first Google-owned system-on-a-chip.
Google's own system-on-a-chip (SoC) is called Whitechapel. Maybe. It’s what a Code Change confirmed in the open source platform Google Source. Kind of. On Google Source, programmers work publicly on improving and further developing Android.
A team has now published code, a simple update in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), designed to update the SELinux policy of the OsloFeedback app. For end users, this is quite meaningless and something that is used without you noticing it. But for scene observers, one line of code is crucial:
https://source.corp.google.com/android/device/google/gs101-sepolicy/whitechapel/vendor/google/twoshay.te;l=9?q=%22binder_use(%22%20p:android$%20f:gs101-sepolicy
The link isn’t publicly available, but it speaks volumes and has driven the gossip factory to work overtime.
What is Whitechapel?
The link leads to an official Google server: source.corp.google.com. There is a security policy, sepolicy, for something called gs101. Within this security policy, there’s something called Whitechapel.
Since security policies of this type are usually issued on hardware, the assumption is that Whitechapel is a hardware component. This confirms rumours, which mention a Google-owned SoC called Whitechapel. gs101 is said to stand for the internal name of the first chip from the Google Silicon series, which is supposed to be revealed one day.
Whitechapel is said to be used in smartphones and Chromebooks. No details have officially been announced.
However, the industry magazine GizChina believes to know that Whitechapel is manufactured in cooperation with Samsung. Furthermore, «P21» is mentioned again here and there in the code, which supposedly stands for «Pixel 2021», as GizChina writer Abdullah writes and refers to a comment written by Googler Adam Shih and is in front of the mysterious link.
You don’t need coredomain to use binder_use. This one lives well on P21.
Google hasn’t yet publicly announced the existence of Whitechapel.
Not the first leak in the code
Google Source is a good way to look into the future. After all, before a device or software can be launched, it has to be developed. In the case of Google's Android, this happens in public, since Android is open source.
2019, the code revealed that the Google Pixel 4 features a 90-hertz display with Android 10.
To date, no Google Pixel has officially appeared on the market in Switzerland. It’s unlikely that P21 will be an exception. Electronics retailers such as digitec.ch import them and handle the warranty themselves. This may have an impact on the price.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.