Laptop-like performance at handheld power levels in a single chip

Consumers are demanding products with more intuitive user interfaces, advanced graphics and the ability to connect any and all devices to the Internet. To empower designers to address these needs, Texas Instruments has developed four OMAP processors, based on the market’s first broad offering of the ARM Cortex-A8 core, providing a good combination of laptop-like performance at handheld power levels in a single chip. With more than four times the processing power of today’s 300 MHz ARM9 devices, the superscalar 600 MHz Cortex-A8 core is integrated into four OMAP35x applications processors for a wide range of possible applications, including portable navigation devices, Internet appliances and portable patient monitoring devices.

Consisting of four distinct single-chip processors: OMAP3503, OMAP3515, OMAP3525 and OMAP3530, the processors offer a variety of combinations of the Cortex-A8 core, multimedia-rich peripherals, OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible graphics engine, video accelerators and TMS320C64x+ DSP core. TI’s DaVinci software technology for video-centric customers will be available for the highest-performance video in the OMAP35x devices, including the OMAP3525 and OMAP3530.

Texas Instruments, www.ti.com



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TI is said to be the first to ship the high-performance ARM Cortex-A8 core, offering a 4x performance improvement over ARM9 family cores.