Shortly after the announcement of the Pixel 2, Google surprised everyone by revealing that the phone has a secret photo chip that had not yet been activated.
As it turns out, the company just activated it for the first time with its latest (and final) developer preview Android 8. 1.
It's called the Pixel Visual Core, and it's the first processor designed by Google, although it got some help from Intel. The chip has eight cores and aims to speed up tasks related to software photography, like the fantastic HDR+ processing that the Pixel 2 has, but also some other AI-powered processes.
In fact, Google says the new chip can handle it photos HDR+ "five times faster" than a traditional processor, which in the case of the Pixel 2 is the Snapdragon 835.
Considering that HDR + is already very fast in Pixel 2, Google will probably use extra processing power to make the photos even better than they already are.
Basically, third-party developers will also be able to take advantage of Visual Core. Theoretically, this means that photos taken through apps like Instagram, Facebook or Snacphat could look as good as the actual camera app.
Developers should of course support the camera API machineGoogle's to work, however, and in the current preview it looks like you have to enable a developer option to enable that processor.
If you are a developer - or just brave - you can try the new feature by signing up for the Android Beta Program from here or if you manually install the new system images from here. Of course due to the beta version you will have to install it at your own risk.
Everyone else will have to wait until the official release of Android 8.1 in December.
