Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Parallel

TI Announces OMAP 4 Mobile App Platform



New multi-core OMAP 4 applications platform from Texas Instruments ushers in a new era of mobile computing performance Future-proof, high-performance, low-power platform makes the vision of the mobile tomorrow a reality

Texas Instruments (TI) has announced OMAP 4, a mobile applications platform that delivers multimedia-rich user experiences such as 1080p video record and playback, 20 megapixel (MP) imaging and approximately a week of audio play time. The company claims that he platform provides significant improvements in performance and play time compared to today's most popular Smartphones, with 10x faster Web page loading times, more than 7x higher computing performance, 6x higher video resolution, 10x better graphics performance and 6x longer audio play time.

At the heart of the OMAP 4 platform is a system-on-chip that aims at balancing power efficiency and high performance across four main engines: a programmable multimedia engine based on TI's C64x DSP and power-efficient, multi-format hardware accelerators; general-purpose processing based on the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore supporting symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and capable of speeds of more than 1GHz per core; a high-performance programmable graphics engine; and an Image Signal Processor (ISP) for unparalleled video and imaging performance. The OMAP 4 platform also includes a software suite, power management technology and other supporting components, providing the foundation necessary to create devices with mobile computing performance at low power.

"For the past decade, TI has focused on providing an optimal balance of high performance and low power consumption in our OMAP product line to address our customers' needs to quickly and easily address new market trends," said TI's Greg Delagi. "The OMAP 4 platform will enable a new class of mobile devices that will redefine the boundaries of Smartphones and MIDs."

OMAP 4 platform highlights:

  • Mobile computing performance and advanced multimedia. The combination of programmability and multicore performance provides flexibility to support new and emerging applications and standards. The first members of the family are the OMAP4430 and OMAP4440, with features including:
    • Four powerful, high-performance processing engines: General-purpose processing leveraging the dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore, supporting SMP; Programmable multimedia engine based on TI's C64x DSP and power-efficient, multi-format hardware accelerators; POWERVX SGX540 graphics engine; Dedicated ISP
    • Full 1080p multi-standard HD record and playback; Digital SLR-like performance with 20 MP imaging; 3D user interfaces supporting life-like graphics, intuitive touch screens, large local displays beyond WSXGA and HDMI compatible external displays.
    • Power management technology, delivering multimedia performance while maximizing battery life: 10+ hours of 1080p HD video playback, 4+ hours of 1080p HD record; 140+ hours of CD quality audio playback
  • Support for mobile operating systems, and a software suite that is tested for real world-uses cases, accelerating time to market. The OMAP 4 platform will support Linux variants such as the Android Mobile Platform and LiMo, as well as Symbian OS and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Additionally, software for the OMAP 4 platform is tested and validated up to the application level.
  • Open platform.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.