Now that the Pixel 11 series is arriving in customers’ hands and we reviewers can actually talk about it, we’re noticing something interesting: Google appears to be seriously throttling the CPU in benchmarks.
I noticed this in our own benchmarking and mentioned it in our review of the Pixel 11 Pro that will go live next week. In particular, in the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, the Pixel 11 Pro stays cooler. Still, it actually scores worse than the Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL, which suggests Google is doing some serious throttling to keep the phone from heating up too much. That is one way to fix the heating issues that Tensor has had, but it won’t satisfy spec junkies.
NotebookCheck is reporting that Mobile-com had similar results with AnTuTu. This shows that with the phone at 36.7 degrees Celsius (around 98F), the GPU essentially collapses. Scoring about a tenth of what it did when it was much cooler. We’re looking at a score of 414,765, down to 40,362.
But the CPU seems to have performed pretty similarly at every temp, which is good news.
Why is Google throttling during benchmarks?
There are plenty of reasons why Google might be throttling the Tensor G6 so heavily during benchmarks. But the big one is likely the temperature. Since the very first Tensor chipset in the Pixel 6, Google has had issues with heat management on its chips. This year, that seemed fixed, but it looks like it may not have. Google is now heavily throttling the chip to keep it from overheating.
Google has also been very adament that the Tensor is not about peak performance, it’s about the experience. And I can say, unlike in previous years, the Tensor G6 does have a really good experience. It runs hot like the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 does, but it doesn’t lag like previous Tensor chips did.
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