2021 Winners and losers: Google

It was a very good year for Google, but especially for its mobile division. The jury’s still out on whether hardware sales will match the quality of its latest phones but in all cases the phones we saw from Google in 2021 deserve respect.

Winner: Tensor

Google’s custom-developed chip Tensor is probably the company’s biggest win. It enables advancements in machine learning and computational photography that Google wouldn’t have been able to achieve by using an off-the-shelf Qualcomm chip.

The processor has two Cortex-X1 cores, instead of the usual one, which means the Tensor is plenty…