TI Brings OMAP 5 to MWC ~ Computer Hardware Mall

Friday, May 18, 2012

A month ago we saw weeks old OMAP 5 silicon running at CES. Earlier this week we got a chance to see TI's OMAP 5 reference platform playing back 1080p video. As a refresher, OMAP 5 features two ARM Cortex A15 cores and is widely expected to offer a significant performance improvement over current A9 based designs. Cortex A15 is a much wider OoO superscalar architecture than the Cortex A9, drawing obvious comparisons to Qualcomm's Krait. We still don't know a lot about Krait's internals so I believe a direct comparison between the two is still premature. There's also the issue of availability. OMAP 5 is expected to ship in devices next year, although we may see some customer announcements/demos before the end of the year if all goes well.

TI also demonstrated a lot of augmented reality applications in its booth at MWC. We saw the standard miniatures in a room demo where you could interact on a tablet with virtual models layered on top of a physical stage. TI had one AR demo that allowed me to try on sunglasses after training it to my face. There's an advertising revolution in the works as soon as someone can figure out the right way to naturally deliver augmented reality to consumer devices. I'm not entirely convinced the smartphone will be the portal to the revolution but I can feel it building...

Gallery: TI Brings OMAP 5 to MWC