TI Shows Off OMAP 5 & ARM Cortex A15 at CES
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on January 12, 2012 5:02 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- OMAP
- TI
- Smartphones
- CES
- Mobile
- CES 2012
- Tablets
- OMAP 5
- SoCs
We weren't allowed to take photos but we've just seen TI's OMAP 5 reference platform up and running Ice Cream Sandwich with full GPU acceleration enabled. The 28nm chip just came back from the fab earlier this month and it's already up and running. TI indicated that 28nm was very healthy.
The high level specs of the SoC are awesome: two ARM Cortex A15s (3-wide OoO cores), 2MB L2 cache, a PowerVR SGX 544MP2 GPU, and a dual-channel LPDDR2-533 (1066MHz data rate) memory interface. OMAP 5 also features integrated 3Gbps SATA and USB 3.0, although PCIe isn't supported.
Target clocks for the A15s are up to 2GHz, although the chip is currently running at ~1GHz and SGX 544 at ~300MHz since it just came back from the fab.
The first devices based on OMAP 5 aren't expected to ship until early 2013, with some aggressive customers potentially shipping at the very end of this year. If Qualcomm gets Krait out on time, it looks like it'll have the majority of the 2012 market to itself with the real battle with TI taking place next year.
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XZerg - Thursday, January 12, 2012 - link
Having the CPU and GPU in one chip and relying on a single channel bandwidth just handicaps the performance quite a bit imo. This definitely ups the ante and would make the system lot more responsive - thinking from a tablet that will have 1920x1200 screens.ltcommanderdata - Thursday, January 12, 2012 - link
Dual channel in handheld SoC isn't the same thing as dual channel on desktops. Desktop use 2x64-bit memory buses. This I believe is just 2x32-bit just like OMAP4 has. The difference is the supported speed is up from LPDDR2-400 in OMAP4 to LPDDR2-533 in OMAP 5. Most other modern SoC also use 2x32-bit memory controllers including the Apple A5, Samsung Exynos, and Qualcomm solutions. The major player that sticks with 1x32-bit seems to be nVidia instead relying on faster memory. I believe Apple was the first to ship a 2x32-bit memory bus SoC in volume with the Apple A4.dagamer34 - Thursday, January 12, 2012 - link
Early 2013? That sucks! I was hoping for late 2012, but I knew in the back of my head that wasn't going to happen when TI rolled out the OMAP4470 with DirectX support that was clearly meant for Windows 8. But hopefully that won't make that big of a difference.digital_dreamer - Thursday, January 12, 2012 - link
Not only does it have two ARM Cortex-A15 cores, but also two Cortex-M4 cores. I assume this may be for general I/O and housekeeping tasks. That thing is loaded.MAJ
twotwotwo - Thursday, January 12, 2012 - link
Will this mean there'll be OoO ARM vs. an in-order Atom soon? Either way, this looks fun to watch, more so than the line of speed/process bumps of the past year or so.tecknurd - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
How come Engadet is allowed to take pictures of the device that is using Texas Instruments OMAP 5 and you are not. Did you do anything mean that made them to not give you permission to take pictures. Not to make you feel bad, Engadet also is able to provide a video.Soulkeeper - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
are these 28nm parts going to be made at globfoundries ?extide - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
No, TSMC. GloFo is doing 32 and 22nm.imkrispy - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
No, globalfoundries is doing 28nmhttp://www.globalfoundries.com/eBooks/white%20pape...
whether its for these chips or not i donno
Aries1470 - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
Geez... this is ancient news. It was announced back in Feb 2011. It was due for mid THIS YEAR around Summer (northern). There are two versions.One of them is this one here, that is aimed at smart phones, and the other that is more geared for Tablets / Nettops. The other uses DDR3.
I will let you do the math:
High-bandwidth memory interface
with 8.5 GB/s
• OMAP5430 – 2-channel LPDDR2 @532 MHz
• OMAP5432 – 2-channel DDR3 @532 MHz
So, which chip are you covering here? The OMAP5430 or the OMAP5432? One has the LPDDR2 and the other the DDR3 /DDR3L
That is from July 2011.
So Anand, please update to show the correct information. As you can also clearly see, the image you have added is for the 5432, but hte description is for the 5430. Key difference being memory.
At a glance:
Target Markets
5430: Area-sensitive (Smartphones, Tablets)
5432: Cost-sensitive (mobile computing, consumer)
Package:
5430: UART (6x), HSIC (3x), SPI (4x), MIPI® UniPortSM-M, MIPI® LLI, HSI (2x)
5432: UART (5x), HSIC (2x), SPI (3x), MIPI® UniPortSM-M, MIPI® LLI, HSI
Memory Support:
5430: (MIPI® CSI-3+ 3x MIPI® CSI-2+ CPI interfaces)
5432: (3x CSI-2+ CPI interfaces)
If you need to learn more:
http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcon...
http://www.ti.com/pdfs/wtbu/SWCT010.pdf
http://focus.ti.com/pdfs/wtbu/OMAP5_2011-7-13.pdf
I have been following this SoC since it was announced and have already reffered to it in a few of my posts ;-)
It will use the two M4 for mundane tasks - i.e. in stand-by mode and phone calls etc and when you need more grunt, the A15's will kick-in.