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TI unveils OMAP 5 SoC family

by Scott Bicheno on 7 February 2011, 18:30

Tags: Texas Instruments (NASDAQ:TXN)

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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.



Features

Benefit *


Two ARM Cortex-A15 cores, up to 2 GHz each

3x higher performance to deliver the promise of mobile computing


Two ARM Cortex-M4 cores  

Low-power offload and real-time responsiveness


Multi-core 3D graphics and dedicated 2D graphics

5x higher graphics performance; accelerated and more responsive user interfaces


Multi-core imaging and vision processing unit

Next-generation computational photography experiences - face recognition, object recognition and text recognition


Multi-core IVA HD video engine

1080p60 HD video and high performance, low bit rate video teleconferencing


Advanced, multi-pipeline display sub-system

Supports multiple video/graphics sources for composition


Can support four simultaneous displays

Supports three high-resolution LCD displays (up to QSXGA) and HDMI 1.4a 3D display


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


TI M-ShieldTM mobile security technology with enhanced cryptography support

End-to-end device and content protection


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


Optimized audio, power and battery management platform solutions

Complementary TI devices for an optimized OMAP 5 platform solution


Next-generation connectivity technologies

HD wireless video streaming, wireless display, mobile payments and enhanced location-based services


*Comparative statements compare OMAP 5 platform to OMAP4430 applications processor.





 

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HEXUS Forums :: 1 Comment

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If anyone is wondering, like me, what the heck “computational photography” is, then there's some examples given at http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/15-463/2007_fall/

Good old Hexus, continuing to educated the uninformed … well, me at least! ;)