Texas Instruments has traditionally kicked off Mobile World Congress with a little glimpse of its chip roadmap, to which everyone in the industry was attuned. Since losing its crown as largest chip provider to the mobile industry to Qualcomm, Texas is listened to less and less, but even if it fell upon some deaf ears, Texas this week promised a huge uplift in capabilities for its next generation OMAP 4 multicore system-on-a-chip architecture, which it says will offer 5 time the performance of OMAP3.
But the architecture that it laid out is currently expected to get most of its usage not in the handset application processor market, which has been its target in the past, but as a multicore DSP design aimed at helping build out infrastructure. The OMAP 4 is claimed to be the mobile industry’s highest performing CPU. Running at 1.2GHz and providing an engine with up to 256 GMACS and 128 GFLOPS ‘ to the uninitiated that’s lots of power, both in normal CPU calculations and floating point arithmetic for precision math.
TI says the chips will accelerate the development of infrastructure products such as wireless base stations, media gateways and video infrastructure equipment.
The product family will include a range of devices from four-cores for wireless base stations and eight-cores for media gateways and networking applications. TI says that it has much faster communication between the on board cores using a 2 terabit per second, on-chip switch fabric. A fabric is a series of self managing parallel connection routes, so any process on one element can speak to any other on the chip via multiple routes. The first chips in this OMAP 4 architecture will begin sampling in the second half of 2010.
But TI has not given up on the handset application processor either and also introduced its Blaze development platform, which is designed to help it make something of a comeback there, saying that the same OMAP 4 chips can offer desktop power on Smartphones, which will ‘wow’ consumers. It will offer advanced touch UI support, TV out through HDMI, Adobe Flash 10.1 support – real Flash, not Flash lite, on a handset; the power to drive onboard digital light processors (for handset embedded projectors), support for Windows Phone 7 and Android, all of which it showed, with partners, at the show.
‘TI envisions a near-term mobile future that will be vastly different than today’s mobile environment,’ said Remi El-Ouazzane, vice president and general manager of TI’s OMAP Platform Business Unit. ‘Similar to how the touchscreen changed the way we interact with our devices, touchless gesturing and 3D-HD mobile capabilities will take experiences to the next level and radically change how we connect to our devices and the things around us. TI is excited to play a key role with our customers in this revolution.’
The idea behind Blaze is to create a handset applications architecture capable of new use cases which are not possible with today’s handset chips, including HD 3D imagery, and even the creation of 3D videoing with a phone. Another is Touchless gesturing, ways to interact with your phone with finger movements ‘in the air.’ This in turn will lead to users being able to ‘point and click’ on images which have been projected by its digital light processor technology, so a video picture on a wall, which you can interact with. Another application is image recognition, allowing face, logo and object recognition on any image captured on a mobile. Previously this was too processor intensive to allow a handset to do it, and Google has already talked about applications which offload this to remote internet servers in the cloud.
The Blaze mobile development platform is really a kind of super handset with everything on it that you might want in any handset. It has dual 3.7 inch WVGA capacitive touch displays, HDMI output, a DLP Pico projector, three multi-megapixel cameras, one primary and two secondary; an accelerometer, compass, ambient light sensor and proximity sensor as well as one which shows barometric pressure and another which measures temperature. We imagine that these capabilities will not be announced in a device for one year and not delivered for two, but they are clearly on the Texas roadmap.
The Blaze platform has two microphones, stereo speakers wi-fi, GPS, Bluetooth and FM radio. It is available to select customers today and general availability is expected by mid-2010.