Texas Instruments shows successor soc from Galaxy Nexus

Texas Instruments has shown a first device equipped with its new Omap5 soc for smartphones and tablets. The predecessor was used in Google’s Galaxy Nexus and the BlackBerry PlayBook, among others.

The samples of the Omap5 soc will be sent to manufacturers next week, reports anandtech. The Omap 5432 should deliver five times better graphics performance than the Omap 4430 and 4460, socs that have been used in the Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Razr and BlackBerry PlayBook, among others. The Omap 5432, which is baked at 28nm, contains two processor cores with Cortex A15 core. The maximum clock speeds will be around 2GHz, but in the reference device they ran around 1GHz.

The Omap5 has four ARM cores. Two of them are of the Cortex A15 MPCore type, which Texas Instruments runs at a maximum of 2GHz. These new processor cores could execute 50 percent more instructions per clock tick than the Cortex A9. There are also two Cortex M4 cores, which are intended for real-time signal processing, which should relieve the Cortex A15 cores.

The GPU in the soc is a dual-core SGX544MP2. This means that Texas Instruments does not use the new and much more powerful GPUs from the PowerVR Series 6. Then the soc could only be sent to manufacturers at a later date and devices with the soc would therefore be released later. Incidentally, TI never uses the latest, just announced GPU. in the Omap4, TI used the SGX540, while the newer SGX543 was already on its way.

The samples of the Omap 5432 will go to manufacturers next week, but TI does not mention which manufacturers they are. Recently, RIM, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung, among others, have used the socs of Texas Instruments.

According to TI, the Omap5 will not only be used in smartphones and tablets, but also ultrabooks with Windows 8 will be equipped with the ARM soc, reports Engadget. Until now, ultrabooks run on Windows 7, which can’t handle ARM’s processor architecture. Windows 8 can.