It’s easy to forget about Texas Instruments Inc. The humble chipmaker, often obscured by the Tegra 2’s and Snapdragon’s of the world, is actually enjoying a not-insignificant amount of success with its OMAP line of SoCs.
The outfit’s previous OMAP (which stands for Open Media Application Platform, in case you were wondering) chips power a variety of mobile devices. Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry PlayBook, the entire Droid family, and hackers plaything du jour the Nook Color are all powered by one variation or another of TI’s unassuming chipset.
The newest version, no doubt on course for a more grand unveiling next week at Mobile World Congress, boasts two processor cores capable of up to 2 GHz per core (that’s double the speed of Nvidia Corp.’s Tegra 2), and features separate secondary cores for taking care of real-time functions, leaving the main cores free to tear through things like 3D graphics and high-definition video.
On the subject of video, TI claim that the OMAP5 will be able to perform on-the-fly 2D to 3D conversion of high-definition video. To give their claims a better sense of context, TI boasted that the new chips offer:
“Up to 3x processing performance and five-fold 3D graphics improvement, yet provide a nearly 60 percent average power reduction compared to a sample user experience on the OMAP 4 platform.”
Impressive stuff, if they can execute and get the new chips to market swiftly enough. If you cast your minds back to the halcyon days of 2009, you’ll remember Nvidia making similarly lofty claims about their soon-to-be-released Tegra 2, and only now is that chip beginning to see decent penetration. If TI have to wait 18 months for uptake of the OMAP5, you can bet Nvidia will be waiting in the wings to steal their thunder with the Tegra 3.
