Google’s Tensor chipsets have never been particularly noteworthy in the performance department. They’ve always lagged behind the likes of Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon chips and Apple’s A-Series silicon. While Google has been hyping up the upgrades it's made to the Pixel 9's Tensor G4, especially with efficiency, it sounds like it may still fall flat in the performance department.
CPU Throttling Test app graphs from user @callmeshazzam on X show that the Tensor G4 inside the Pixel 9 Pro XL may be getting throttled by as much as 50%. This means that Google could have deliberately nerfed the chip’s performance, and it looks like temperature regulation may be the reason why.
The stress test shows that the frequency of the Tensor G4’s performance cores actually drop from 3.10GHZ down to 1.32GHz, while efficiency cores drop from 1.92GHz all the way down to 0.57GHz. That's pretty disappointing, especially considering all three Pixel 9 Pro models have a larger vapor cooling chamber to ensure better heat dissipation.
Considering the Pixel 8 series had some notable issues with overheating, that improvement was sorely needed. But it would have been nice to see an improvement to the Tensor G4’s heat production at the same time.
As WCCFTech notes, there are some factors that we don’t know, such as the ambient temperature when the Pixel 9 Pro XL was stress tested. On top of that, the site points out that the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 lost 46% of its performance during the same testing, suggesting that the test itself is designed to push smartphone chips to the limit.
Still, considering Google’s history with low benchmarking scores, it’s not great to see any evidence of throttling, even if it may only occur in very niche circumstances. We haven’t been able to do any thorough benchmarking tests on the new Pixels ourselves yet, so we don’t know how the numbers will compare to this stress test. Plus, while benchmarks don’t show everything, it’s still super disappointing to face the prospect of Tensor falling even further behind the competition.
We’ll just have to wait and see how the Pixel 9 series actually holds up in testing, But in the meantime, you can check out our early impressions in our Pixel 9 hands-on review, Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL hands-on review and our Pixel 9 Pro Fold hands-on review.
