Tensor G6 is faster. It is still a generation behind Snapdragon

Google's Pixel 11 store page makes three claims for Tensor G6: a 50 percent more powerful Tensor Processing Unit, 25 percent faster browsing and up to 20 percent better power efficiency. Read what is absent. No CPU figure against Qualcomm. No frame rate against anyone. Two reviewers then found the benchmark apps themselves had gone missing — Robert Triggs at Android Authority had to work around Google blocking them via the Play Store before he could test at all, and Geekyranjit filmed Geekbench refusing to install on a Pixel 11 while the same search worked on last year's Pixel 10. The scores came out regardless, and the gap they show is not a rounding error.

Once a Pixel 11 Pro XL was running Geekbench 6, Tensor G6 posted about an 18 percent single-core and 21 percent multi-core gain over Tensor G5. That is a real step. It is also nowhere near the rest of the $900 aisle. Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phones still led Triggs' bench by 37 percent in single-core and 52 percent in multi-core. Apple's A19 cores were 44 percent ahead in the same test. Samsung's Exynos 2600, using similar Arm C1 cores but more of them, was 51 percent ahead in multi-core on a Galaxy S26 Plus.

Tom's Guide landed in the same neighbourhood: 2,664 single-core and 7,347 multi-core for the Pixel 11, against 3,531 / 10,778 for a Snapdragon Galaxy S26 and 3,701 / 9,460 for an iPhone 17. Gizmochina's head-to-head between a Pixel 11 Pro XL and a Galaxy S26 Ultra is blunter still. Geekbench 6: 2,671 / 6,802 versus 3,726 / 11,402. AnTuTu v11: 1.86 million versus 3.90 million. 3DMark Wild Life Extreme: 20.31 frames per second versus 46.34. “Google's fine with it,” the site wrote, and on the design brief it is right. Tensor exists to run on-device models, not to win synthetic contests.

The floorplan matches that brief. Tensor G6 is a seven-core chip, one core lighter than G5, with a 4.11GHz Arm C1-Ultra, four C1-Pro cores at 3.38GHz and two more C1-Pro cores at 2.65GHz, still on TSMC's 3nm node. Qualcomm's rival is an eight-core Oryon design whose two Prime cores run at 4.61GHz. Google spent the transistor budget elsewhere: a fifth-generation TPU, a new Titan M3 security processor and a MediaTek M90 modem. Two days into a base Pixel 11, Geekyranjit reckoned the modem swap was already earning its place, with noticeably less heat on mobile data than the G5 phone he had been carrying, even though the chip sits roughly 40 percent behind current Snapdragon flagships on CPU and GPU.

CPU scores are the polite version of this story. The graphics part is ruder.

Google moved Pixel to Imagination's PowerVR last year and stayed there. Tensor G6 uses a PowerVR CXTP-48-1536 clocked around 1.29GHz, up from 1.10GHz on G5. Android Authority's 3DMark runs found a 7 to 10 percent peak gain, then watched sustained performance fall below last year's GPU after a few minutes of stress. The Adreno 840 in Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 more than doubled Tensor's Wild Life Extreme score. MediaTek's Dimensity 9500, with Arm's G1-Ultra, was 135 percent ahead. Tensor G6 still has no hardware ray tracing.

Those are lab numbers. Game engines are worse. CNET's Mike Sorrentino found Fortnite struggling on Low at 30 frames per second on an $899 Pixel 11, a class of phone that usually runs the same title on high; Fall Guys held 60fps on Best settings. NL Tech's 45-minute gaming test on a Pixel 11 Pro put a colour on the problem. Genshin Impact rendered entirely pink, which he traced to a developer devlog about a year earlier removing PowerVR from the game's officially supported GPUs. Shader stutters and crashes turned up in other titles.

PowerVR is not a toy GPU. It is a lonely one. Adreno and Mali cover almost the whole Android flagship market, and Pixel is the high-end holdout. So the “silicon and software optimizations” Google cites for improved performance in Asphalt Legends, Disney Speedstorm and Squad Busters are doing, title by title, work that Snapdragon owners get from the engine for free.

None of this means the Pixel 11 feels slow in a pocket. Marques Brownlee, who opened his August impressions by admitting he talks himself into the same yearly hope — “And every year... they don't” — still found the phone “as smooth as it can be in my hands-on, but it always is.” His verdict on the line as a whole was a shrug: “You know, it's a Pixel. It is what it is.” A week on the base model left 9to5Google in the same place, calling Tensor G6 “identical to me day-to-day” with cold app launches faster by milliseconds. Google's 25 percent browsing claim is software tuning, not a CPU victory lap, and the interface is not where Tensor loses.

What it loses is the part buyers were asked to stop measuring. A Pixel ships with seven years of OS and security updates, and it starts that run with a CPU Triggs pegged at 2025-era Dimensity 9400 level and a GPU more than a generation behind Adreno 840. Year six of that support window has to be served by silicon that is already a year late. Android Authority's advice was the one it has been writing since Tensor became a specialist: buy a Pixel 11 for Google's features, skip it if you want the best performance money can buy. The TPU got its 50 percent. Everything the benchmarks measure got a polite nudge.