I suspect that for still images the Pixel Visual Core won't make that big of a difference on activation for still shots. It'll certainly be needed for AR Stickers. Just a thought, and it's probably a pipe dream, but it would be amazingif it allowed for capturing video with HDR+, providing the same level of improvement as we see with still images!
Oh, I disagree.
Some months back, one of the Googlers was speaking at a tech thing. He talked about Google Photos and machine learning among other subjects and kinda joked that if you out and about in NYC, they could 'take a pic' of what was in front of you only knowing where you are and what direction you are facing because of the massive amount of image data that they've acquired with Google Photos. Now, I thought that was kinda of cool but didn't put much thought into it until I heard about the PVC.
Now, what's not to say that Google can't utilize all that data and machine learning and apply it to your still pictures via that beast.
The most powerful imaging processing system known to man is the human brain.... for good reason because our eyes kinda suck. At birth, we're a mess and it takes a while for our brain to program itself to be able to detect colors, contrast, details... pattern recognition, etc. The amount of data processing that is going on every second is staggering.
So now Google has a massive amount of data to draw upon... pictures of landmarks, dogs, clouds, bugs, street signs, wives, kids, concrete, burritos and steel wire....
So I think when that SoC kicks in, it is going to process any image you take and then use all that learned knowledge to augment HDR+. So when you take that vacation to Paris and take a picture of your wife/gf in front of the Eiffel Tower, it will know what both her face should look like and what the trusses of that tower should look like; the mime off to the right, the coffee cart next to here and the bird flying overhead.... down to keeping the tiny freckle that's on the corner of her left eye that your G6 would TOTALLY wipe away. This would take a substantial amount of processing power, of course. Maybe, perhaps a processor that can crank out 3 trillion ops a second?
Maybe I'm going way too sci/fi here with this, but I see all those little hints over the past couple of years. If this is the direction they are going in, man....we haven't seen anything yet.