Made by Google 2026: This limited silicon-supply situation really sucks

AI-driven demand underpins logic foundry and memory fab capacity constraints, leading to cost increases. Add tariffs to the mix, and Google and its competitors (not to mention end users) pay the price.

Last year’s Made By Google fall product launch event happened midday on August 20, moderated by Jimmy Fallon. Although I found value in the devices, software and services Google unveiled there, the un-traditional Tonight Show-styled format wasn’t particularly to my liking, a negative opinion shared by a notable number of others whose coverage I subsequently perused.

This year’s event, earlier today (August 12) as I write this, was once again celebrity-moderated, this time by Trevor Noah. But this time it took place in the evening, with the announcements notably preceding it; a flurry of blog posts had already hit Google’s website at 8 am MT, where I am. Feel free to draw your own conclusions as to the judged effectiveness (or, perhaps more accurate, lack thereof) of last year’s event And begging the question of why Google bothered doing this year’s event at all, save I suppose for the chance to see “live” demos, “softball” interviews and other such questionable-value content.

That said, the products themselves once again were notable, both in an absolute sense and relative to their prior-generation predecessors.

Befitting my engineering-dominated readership, I’ll as usual start out my coverage with the application processor, the Tensor G6, the intelligence nexus of the Pixel 11 smartphone series.

Power/performance balance (and profit) optimization

When I published last year’s event coverage, little was known at the time about the latest-generation Tensor G5 SoC save for its 3 nm TSMC fabrication source (a notable departure from Google’s longstanding foundry partnership with Samsung) and its eight-core CPU cluster mix: “one “prime” core, five mid-level ones, and two efficiency ones.” Beyond that, all Google was saying at the time was that, versus its Tensor G4 predecessor, it delivered the following updates.

An up to 60% more powerful TPU
A 34% faster on average CPU, and
New security hardware

One year later, thanks to intensive developer engagement with the platform, we know much more about the Tensor G5 than we did before.

CPU (8 total cores): 1x Arm Cortex-X4 at 3.78 GHz, 5x Arm Cortex-A725 at 3.05 GHz, 2x Arm Cortex-A520 at 2.25 GHz
GPU: Imagination Technologies PowerVR (DXT-48-1536)

And now on “Day Zero” of the Tensor G6 era, what’s Google saying about it? Predictably, not much beyond another year’s worth of nebulous hand waving in comparison to the Tensor G5:

Tensor G6 features an upgraded CPU for 25% faster web browsing and 15% quicker app launches. Packing 50% more TPU compute and paired with the latest Gemini Nano model, Google Tensor G6 processes on-device AI tasks up to 3.5 times faster while using up to 3.5 times less energy.

But thanks to a leak sourced from embargoed media hands-on time with the Pixel 11 family, the following additional (and more specific) Tensor G6 specs, referencing Arm’s C-series cores, are also presumably accurate.

The Tensor G6 sports a seven-core configuration, with one prime “C1 Ultra” core clocked at 4.1GHz, four performance “C1 Pro” cores clocked at 3.4GHz, and two efficiency “C1 Pro” cores clocked at 2.65GHz. The GPU appears to be a PowerVR C-series variant with six compute units clocked at 1.3GHz.

One other silicon-related nuance also bears mention. Although, as previously mentioned, Google switched from Samsung to TSMC as its foundry source for the Tensor G5 last year, it stuck with Samsung’s Exynos cellular subsystem. This year, reportedly (although I haven’t yet seen definitive confirmation), this too has changed; Google’s supposedly now leveraging MediaTek M90 5G cellular IP.

Smartphone evolutionary modesty

Aside from the new colorways, you’d understandably likely be hard-pressed to discern a visual difference between Google’s latest handsets—the baseline Pixel 11, high-end Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL, and book-style Pixel 11 Fold—and their 10^th generation predecessors. Backs are once again all-glass. Displays are a bit brighter, and more scratch-resistant in the “Pro” variants. Camera bars are a bit more svelte (along with overall Fold thinness), and for “Pro” versions, embed a multicolor notification LED assembly surrounding the flash and branded “HiLight”. Particularly clever readers may have already noted the enhanced scratch-resistance association, since the notifications can only be seen when the phone is screen-down on a flat surface.

That all said, to the overall “supply constraints” theme of this writeup, I’ll point out that the Pixel 11 storage options now start at 256 GBytes; the entry-level 128 GByte variant of the Pixel 10 that I recently acquired isn’t offered this time around. In Google’s defense, Apple did the same thing a year ago with the iPhone 17 versus its iPhone 16 precursor, although in that earlier case the 2x capacity multiplier came for the same intro price as the 128 GByte prior-gen device.

This time the 256 GByte Pixel 11 price thankfully at least matches that of the year-ago 256 GByte Pixel 10, versus with an accompanying price increase as other smartphone suppliers are doing nowadays. Further to Google’s defense, note that a year ago any bill-of-materials cost increases were predominantly due to tariff impacts. Now, in contrast, supply constraints are additionally being felt to fuller effect. It’ll be curious to see how Apple handles both memory and TSMC foundry cost increases at its likely next-month announcement event; for one thing, the company will reportedly delay the launch of its baseline iPhone 18 until sometime next year.

In closing, at least for this section, one more memory-related twist bears mention. A year ago, I wrote, “Google also didn’t “hide” tariff costs by cutting RAM capacities (which would counterbalance its burgeoning AI ambitions, anyway)”. Well, this year they did. The lowest (256 GByte) storage capacity variants of the Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL also have less RAM—12 GBytes vs 16 GBytes—than both their higher-capacity this-year siblings and same-capacity Pixel 10 predecessors, in the latter case with no accompanying generational price break. Admittedly, Google’s working hard on optimizing memory requirements for its on-device models, but still…

Watches and trackers

Last year’s Pixel Watch 4 was a notable update to its predecessor(s), as I wrote about at the time (although I’m still fiscally quite content with a recent update from my long-in-the-tooth first-generation wearable to “only” the Pixel Watch 3, more discussion of which I’ll save for another post another day). This year’s Pixel Watch 5 advancements are also more modest, notably including slight (~12%) CPU performance and battery capacity upticks along with an on-device AI-intended RAM upgrade from 2 GBytes to 3 GBytes, the latter leading to—you guessed it—an associated $50 price tag increment.

I’m not entirely sure why Google included a set of earbuds in its launch suite promo photo shown earlier this piece, as aside from a new Pixel Buds 2 (two years old) colorway option and pending firmware-delivered feature updates to both them and the Pixel Buds 2a (introduced a year ago), nothing’s new. Conversely, the most brand-new device released this week was the Pixel Tag, unsurprisingly supportive of Google’s Find My Device network and conceptually similar to (and a competitor of) Apple’s also-UWB-enhanced second-generation AirTag.

Hopefully, this wireless-connectivity enhancement suggests that we’ll be seeing broader support for UWB in both Google’s and other Android licensees’ handsets in the future. My biggest surprise here is that, unlike Motorola and other tracker manufacturers, Google didn’t also adopt an AirTag-clone form factor that would enable it to slot into the already sizeable and still steadily expanding AirTag ecosystem of luggage tags, stealth security setups and the like.

That’s what I’ve got for you today, folks. As always, please sound off with your thoughts in the comments!

—Brian Dipert is the associate editor, as well as a contributing editor, at EDN.

Made by Google 2026: This limited silicon-supply situation really sucks

Power/performance balance (and profit) optimization

Smartphone evolutionary modesty

Watches and trackers

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