One of the selling points of Google’s Pixel A-series smartphones in recent years is that you get many of the features of the company’s flagship phones, but in a cheaper body with a few cut corners. Now it looks like one of the corners Google cut with the Pixel 7a was the packaging technology used for the phone’s Tensor G2 processor.

According to a discovery by kamila wojciechowska, while the phone nominally uses the same chip as the processor used in the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, and Pixel Tablet, the budget version appears to use a cheaper package that chip manufacturer Samsung says is thicker, larger, and runs hotter… which could lead to slightly degraded performance in some situations unless Google has made other changes in the phone’s design to make up for it. And maybe Google has. We don’t really know.

Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.

Not all Google Tensor G2 chips are the same [@Za_Raczke]

The Tensor G2 chip in the Pixel 7a might run slightly hotter than the version in the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro due to different packaging technology.

OnePlus V Fold First Look: A Glimpse into the OnePlus Fold [SmartPrix]

Leaked pictures of the upcoming OnePlus V Fold show a foldable phone with three rear cameras (including one with periscopic optical zoom), a large cover display, alert slider and fingerprint sensor on the sides.

The PICO3566 is an alternative to Raspberry Pi CM3 [LinuxGizmos]

Boardcon PICO3566 is a drop-in replacement for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ but instead of a BCM2837B0 chip, it has a Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 CPU with Mali-G52 2EE graphics and a 1 TOPS NPU.

Keep up on the latest headlines by following @[email protected] on Mastodon. You can also follow Liliputing on Twitter and Facebook, and keep up with the latest open source mobile news by following LinuxSmartphones on Twitter and Facebook.

P.S. I’ve been trying out Lemmy a bit this week as a possible alternative/compliment to Reddit because, you know, reasons. It’s a bit of a ghost town compared to Reddit right now, but there are a few pretty active communities and it looks like Lemmy could be in for a growth spurt similar to the one that started at Mastodon last year. At the very least, it looks like I’m not the only person taking notice of this decentralized, federated, open source link & comment aggregation service.

Anyone else have any experience with Lemmy and/or Kbin? Share your favorite communities, tips, tricks, skepticism, critiques, or complaints in the comments. 

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,544 other subscribers

Join the Conversation

5 Comments

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  1. I just signed up for Kbin yesterday. Definitely less activity than reddit, but I like the fact that it can pull in content from Lemmy and other things automatically.

    Reply

  2. Creating a new SKU and maintaining inventory for it probably doesn’t allow for any significant money savings. Looks like Google’s suppliers talked them into doing goofy stuff.

    Reply