At the moment the co-processor is doing nine shades of bugger all but it was originally installed to improve speed and battery life when shooting photos with Google's HDR+ technology. 

TechCrunch reports on a new developer preview of Android 8.1 - due out today - that puts the chip to use.

The component is expected to improve further the handsets' cameras, which were already scoring good marks, production issues aside.

The Pixel Visual Core has eight image processing unit (IPU) cores and 512 arithmetic logic units.

Using machine learning, the company says it can speed things up by five times using one-tenth of the energy.

Access to the chip, combined with the Android Camera API, means third-party photo apps can take advantage of the system's speedy HDR+.

Google wouldn't give any more specific information about when the feature will be unlocked for the public, but it's expected to arrive along with the 8.1 public beta in December.