Texas Instruments unveils 1.8GHz, multi-core OMAP4470 ARM processor

Just in time with the public announcement and demonstration of Windows 8, chip makers have been rushing to announce compatible chips. Qualcomm was the first one to announce a couple of ARM-based processors for Windows 8 and now Texas Instruments didn’t wait much with its own OMAP4-gen TI OMAP4470 system-on-a-chip. It runs on up to the impressive 1.8GHz of clock speed with multiple cores humming along to power Windows 8 on smartphones, tablets and netbooks.

Pure specifications point at a powerful POWERVR SGX544 GFX graphical chip clocked at 384MHz supporting DirectX 9 paying reverence to Windows, along with OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenVG 1.1 and OpenCL 1.1. That translates into compatibility with displays sporting QXGA 2048 x 1536 resolution or 3 HD screens at the same time. But even more importantly for Internet surfers – up to two times the browsing performance.

In a way, it’s also an answer to NVIDIA’s upcoming quad-core processors as the OMAP4470 chip as its two Cortex-A9 cores are linked to two A3 cores along with LPDDR2 memory with 7.5Gbps of bandwidth. This might just be a more power-efficient solution as more intensive tasks get assigned to the A9 cores, while other could get passed to the A3 cores. Texas Instruments promises as much as 10 hours of continuous full HD playback and 4 hours of recording at full HD quality.

The chip will start sampling in the second semester of 2011, but first commercial devices aren’t expected before the first half of 2012. If you feel excited about the technology, you should know that the OMAP5 platform including chips like the TI OMAP5430 and OMAP 5432 brings 28-nm dual-core architecture on ARM Cortex-A15 cores with speeds reaching 2GHz. Check out the fact sheet below and let us know whether you think that TI’s new chip will be a worthy competitor to Intel’s chips in the comments.

source:  Texas Instruments via SlashGear