It's slightly faster.
The might ship with revised internal hardware from Qualcomm in the form of a new processor, the Snapdragon 836. That's according to silicon rumormonger , which offers up the following plausible but completely unsurprising info, courtesy of its sources:
- The Pixel 2 phones will be the first to ship with Snapdragon 836
- The chip itself will supposedly be a minor revision to the 835, with a small bump to maximum clock speeds. (Base clock speeds may not increase, or only increase negligibly.)
- There'll also be some battery life improvements.
If true, this would mirror the situation of last year, when the first emerged as the first phone with Snapdragon 821 in the West — the 821 being a minor revision of the 820 chip powering many of 2016's flagships.
Silicon revisions are all well and good, and it'd certainly be a small big significant win for Google to achieve the tiny performance and battery life edge presumably offered by the new platform. But are they the most interesting thing about a phone ? Probably not.
So far, only a small amount of information has leaked out, and we're still waiting for reliable details on important areas like the camera, battery capacity and other key specs.