Development on a Google-designed system-on-chip (SoC) first began in April 2016, after the introduction of the company's first Pixel smartphone, although Google CEO Sundar Pichai and hardware chief Rick Osterloh agreed it would likely take an extended period of time before the product was ready.

[1] The next year, the company's hardware division assembled a team of 76 semiconductor researchers specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), which has since increased in size, to work on the chip.

[6] The Neural Core was not included on the Pixel 5, which was released in 2020; Google explained that the phone's Snapdragon 765G SoC already achieved the camera performance the company had been aiming for.

Carmack explained that this was so Tensor could remain efficient at intense workloads by running both large cores simultaneously at a low frequency to manage the various co-processors.

[15] Osterloh has stated that Tensor's performance is difficult to quantify using synthetic benchmarks, but should instead be characterized by the many ML capabilities it enables, such as advanced speech recognition,[1] real-time language translation, the ability to unblur photographs,[2] and HDR-like frame-by-frame processing for videos.

[64] Jacon Krol of CNN Underscored wrote that Tensor delivered "some of the most fluid and fastest performance" on a smartphone,[65] though Android Authority's Jimmy Westenberg was ambivalent.

[67] TechRadar reviewer James Peckham commended Tensor as a "standout feature",[68] though his colleague David Lumb described the chip's performance as "strong but not class-leading".