Android 8.1 Oreo rolls out now, available on Nexus and Pixel devices

After releasing two of their developer previews, the Android 8.1 Oreo is now completely ready to hit out the masses. The Google has announced that the new Operating System is about to roll out now, and is posting the system images for the Pixel 2 XL and Pixel 2, the Pixel 1 XL and Pixel 1, the Nexus 6P and 5X, the Pixel C tablet. The AOSP (Android Open Source Project) code drop shall be happening along with the release of the latest version of OS too.

The Android 8.1 Oreo is said to be a minor maintenance release that gets released after the major update that was earlier released as the Android 8.0. The biggest and known feature of the 8.1 is about the Neural Networks API, shortly called the NNAPI, is designed to run along with machine learning operations on the mobile devices. The phones that are specialized with machine learning hardware shall now accelerate them using this particular API, while the older devices shall make use of them with the CPU fallback mode. The API has been providing a base layer, machine learning framework and a higher level to plug into, like the Google’s TensorFlow Lite.

The very first phone that is about to ship out with these special machine learning co-processors is the Pixel 2, which has been packing a new custom and Google designed eight-core SoC, named as the Pixel Visual Core. This is the first ever consumer SoC released by the Google, and it shall live alongside with the regular eight core Qualcomm Snapdragon 835.

This particular Pixel Visual Core has been designed with the help of the Intel, shall power up the NNAPI functions and it shall allow the Google’s new HDR plus image processing, five times faster to their previous devices. The device gets shipped in a dormant mode, yet, with the latest release of the Android 8.1, the Google is now turning it on automatically for everyone.