Bolt from the blue
With no fanfare and, strangely, a week before the biggest mobile phone show of the year, Texas Instruments has announced the launch of its next mobile SoC family - OMAP 5.
As you would expect, TI is attaching all kinds of superlatives to the chip, saying it will transform the concept of mobile. But the single fact that caught our eye straight way is that it uses ARM's Cortex A15 CPU design.
Regular readers will remember ARM only launched the Cortex A15 last September, calling it the biggest thing it has ever done. TI was announced as the lead licensee, so for OMAP 5 to incorporate it is no great surprise, we just weren't expecting an announcement so soon, especially with OMAP 4 only just starting to enter the marketplace.
"The OMAP 5 platform will be at the heart of driving the mobile computing revolution by delivering the highest computing, graphics and multimedia performance possible within the low power budget required by mobile form factors," said Remi El-Ouazzane, VP of OMAP at TI.
Also a surprise is that the OMAP 5 chips will only have two CPU cores, as the Cortex A15 design is scalable to many more and we expect to see quad-core SoCs announced at MWC. The graphics duties are handled by an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544 core. It will be manufactured on the 28nm process.
We've reproduced a bunch of TI information below, but among the more eye-catching things OMAP 5 can enable are the ability to support up to four cameras, and thus allow the recording of stereoscopic 3D video. There's also talk of touchless sensing, interactive projection and computational photography. TI expects to begin sampling in the second half of this year, with the first devices arriving a year later.
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Features |
Benefit * |
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Two ARM Cortex-A15 cores, up to 2 GHz each |
3x higher performance to deliver the promise of mobile computing |
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Two ARM Cortex-M4 cores |
Low-power offload and real-time responsiveness |
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Multi-core 3D graphics and dedicated 2D graphics |
5x higher graphics performance; accelerated and more responsive user interfaces |
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Multi-core imaging and vision processing unit |
Next-generation computational photography experiences - face recognition, object recognition and text recognition |
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Multi-core IVA HD video engine |
1080p60 HD video and high performance, low bit rate video teleconferencing |
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Advanced, multi-pipeline display sub-system |
Supports multiple video/graphics sources for composition |
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Can support four simultaneous displays |
Supports three high-resolution LCD displays (up to QSXGA) and HDMI 1.4a 3D display |
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High performance, multi-channel DRAM and efficient 2D memory support |
Supports advanced use cases with multiple ARM cores and multimedia operation; provides better user experiences without lag or quality degradation |
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TI M-ShieldTM mobile security technology with enhanced cryptography support |
End-to-end device and content protection |
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New, high-speed interfaces |
Supports USB 3.0 OTG, SATA 2.0, SDXC flash memory and MIPI® CSI-3, UniPort-M and LLI interfaces to support higher Wi-Fi and 4G network and HD content data rates |
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Optimized audio, power and battery management platform solutions |
Complementary TI devices for an optimized OMAP 5 platform solution |
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Next-generation connectivity technologies |
HD wireless video streaming, wireless display, mobile payments and enhanced location-based services |
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*Comparative statements compare OMAP 5 platform to OMAP4430 applications processor. |
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