Breaking the silence
Texas Instruments (TI) has been talking about the OMAP 4 platform for a very long time, but while potential customers like Apple have decided to get into the chip game themselves, and competitors like Qualcomm talk up their new dual-core SoCs, TI has remained strangely quiet.
The US computing giant went some way towards addressing that by announcing - albeit with little fanfare - the new high-end member of the OMAP family. The OMAP4440 is, as the name implies, a bit better than the first announced 4-series chip - the OMAP4430.
To be honest, we weren't entirely sure what had been announced from reading the press release, so we fired a few questions over to TI and got these responses:
HEXUS: What has been announced - the 4440 or just tweaks to the 4440?
TI: We are announcing the OMAP4440, not tweaks to the OMAP4440. While we initially introduced the OMAP4440 in an earlier announcement, we did not release the applications processor's details. Today's announcement defines the capabilities offered by the OMAP4440.
H: What changes were there?
TI: The details at the start of the press release highlight the mobile device-centric performance improvements achieved by the OMAP4440 applications processor that build upon the performance success already delivered by its family member, the OMAP4430 processor. To reiterate, the highlights include:
- 1.25x increase in graphics performance
- 30% decrease in webpage load times
- 2x increase in 1080p video playback performance
- Clock speeds of 1.5 GHz per CPU core
H: Why should any OEM use the 4430 when the 4440 is so much better?
TI: OMAP4430 offers impressive performance as well and is in production the first half of 2011-so customers seeking to deliver mobile devices with the OMAP 4 platform early next year will benefit from the OMAP4430 processor. As the OMAP4440 is hardware (pin-to-pin) and software compatible to the OMAP4430, migration to OMAP4440 will be simplified to satisfy the processing needs of our customers' next wave of devices and incredible new user experiences.
H: How many design wins does TI have for the OMAP 4 series and when can we expect to first see products in the market?
TI: We expect to see OMAP 4 devices hit the market in the coming months. Regarding actual customer product types or design wins, TI does not confirm customers are using our chips or comment on upcoming customer products until they choose to make such news public.
So, in summary, the OMAP4440 is an optimised version of the 4430, with the CPU clock and graphics performance being significantly better, as you can see from the TI table below. We can expect to see devices running the 4430 in the first half of next year and the 4440 in the second half.
