Every two years or so Texas Instruments shows what a forward looking company it is and describes a new application processing architecture for the cellular industry and it usually pre-announces it at one Mobile World Congress and delivered it at the next. This time it is pre-announcing it a full week prior to the show and is paralleling it to the Model T Ford, aimed, as it says it is at transforming people’s lives.
That’s a bit dramatic. Or is it? We would prefer to place the credit where it is due, for the most part at ARM’s door, but also collectively this is capitalism working at its best. We have gone from a 20 year Intel hegemony in portable processing power, with the help of some 300 or so companies getting behind ARM, taking some 500 or so licenses and offering multiple thousands of discrete designs. Not only has the cellular industry held Intel’s dominance at bay but it has created almost an open source model for chips, with all of them effectively co-operating to stay out of the clutches of monopoly chip making.
TI has built on that by taking all the elements offered in this way, both by ARM and by Imagination Technologies with its PowerVR graphics cores, and put them together on a next generation design, using a next generation chip geometry (28 nm).
This has produced the OMAP 5 applications processor and there are two hard designs, the OMAP 5430 for smart phones and the OMAP 5432 for portable computing devices, so read Tablets, offering 3 times the processing power and five times the 3D graphics power, with a 60% reduction in battery power of TI’s previous OMAP generation. TI says that OMAP 5 software will offer maximum reuse of the OMAP 4 platform, so porting should be fairly easy.
But while we don’t want to give all the credit to Texas Instruments, not only because some of it belongs to ARM and some to its multiple licensees, we pretty much agree that using multiple cores in multiple iterations, will lead to transformative advances.
The OMAP5 range has 2 ARM Cortex A15s, which each run at 2 GHz, providing something close to 4 GHz of processing cycles, as well as 2 Cortex M4 processors, these are extra ARM cores which allow jobs to be offloaded to them when someone wants to use the device for something else. This is to cut out any waiting for the phone to finish what it is doing, and bring its A15 attention back to the UI, so that more commands can be input, even when it’s already busy.
And while this monster does outstrip any ARM based chip out there, it is usually the case that the first chip company to define its architecture, ends up producing a chip that can be bested by its rivals subsequently, so while the OMAP 4 super phones were not so super as those based on 1GHz, it’s likely that OMAP 5 has a lead for perhaps a year, maybe longer, and so this chip will end up on many devices designs, even if it ends up with Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung and others racing past it in the not too distant future.
The first thing you notice when you look at the videos demonstrating devices based on the OMAP 5 is that they are shown driving HD screens while simultaneously being controlled with gesture control, meaning it has enough processing power to recognize hand gestures. This is what TI means by saying it is transformative. It crosses boundaries with this amount of processing power, taking things that were not possible and making them possible. The device has the power to drive a 24 megapixel camera, if anyone learns how to make one cheaply enough to put in a phone in the next couple of years. TI goes further and says that the chip can drive a pico-projector, something that it has been trying to get into a phone for years, and that it can provide gesture touch with this, where someone reaches forward onto the projected image and drags and drop what is projected. This is once instance of the intelligent gesture control. It also has included proximity sensing, which means that it doesn’t only work out what your gestures are telling it, but it can vary that based on how close your hands are to the device. All that logic is onboard, so device designers should be able to added those features fairly easily and make them available to developers who can use them to drive applications.
TI depicts a single device which is your phone and which also provides PC-like computing performance with mobile power levels. Now we just need someone like Apple (but of course not actually Apple) to turn that capability into a real device.
If we compare this with Apple’s A4, which drives both the iPad and iPhone 4, as well as the later iPod Touch models and the Apple TV, we find that Apple has to get through a huge step change here, of something close to four times the processing speed, to have the same kind of power. Sure it’s device is based on the Samsung Hummingbird design, which we are sure will keep up, and the first A4 chip was announced almost a year ago and the Hummingbird it was based on was pretty new at the time and claimed to be three times the graphics processing power of the Qualcomm SnapDragon. But since then things have moved on.
But in the end they now all get their power from the ARM design and their graphics power for the most part comes from the PowerVR GPU from Imagination Technologies. Effectively it’s commodity, and given multiple chip suppliers in the market it means that there can be no ‘premium’ pricing, as there could with Intel processors. Price is one of the ingredients in each SoC’s appeal, and each of them have a limited period of time to earn their money before the next rival and better SoC is out, with slightly more aggressive claims.
TI also says that it can drive 1080p HD at 60 frames per second, which increasingly video is output in (for instance that’s the default for the Sony PS3 We think). The chip also comes with the existing Texas security system M-Shield, and Texas says that the device has to be this fast to support LTE data speeds.
The OMAP 5 processor has up to 8GB of dynamic memory access and includes individual, dedicated engines for video, imaging and vision, DSP, 3D graphics, 2D graphics, display and security. It can support four cameras at the same time and perform real-time conversion of 2D content to S3D at 1080p resolution.
The camera processor should mean that this will help devices perform like a digital SLR camera using camera stabilization, motion blur reduction, noise reduction, high dynamic range and face-based processing. The new processor will also be powerful enough to extract features and data from a picture, for augmented reality applications. The chips will be out to sample in the second half of 2011, with devices on the market in the second half of 2012.
TI is always a benchmark of where the industry is headed because its chips were in about 50% of the last generation of mobile devices, and it is very driven by what customers tell it they want ‘ it doesn’t invent any of this stuff on spec, it goes through an iterative process with customers who ask for specific chip features.