 In February, Texas Instruments introduced four new members of its OMAP3 family of high-end application processors, and announced that these chips will be offered broadly as part of TI's "catalog" product line.
Like the original OMAP3 chip (the OMAP3430, which remains exclusive to TI's wireless handset chip division), all four of the new OMAP35x chips use the ARM Cortex-A8, a superscalar 32-bit CPU core. (BDTI benchmark results are available for the Cortex-A8). The first of the four chips, OMAP3503, is sampling now with a 600 MHz Cortex-A8.
Given the care with which TI laid out its implementation of the Cortex-A8 core in earlier OMAP processors, and TI's recent announcement of an 800 MHz OMAP3440 (from TI's Wireless Terminal Business Unit (WTBU)), BDTI expects future OMAP35x chips to include faster Cortex-A8 cores.
TI announced that the new OMAP3503 will be complemented by three other processors in the second half of 2008. As shown in the following table, the forthcoming family members incorporate various combinations of coprocessors to augment the ARM core.
The figure below gives an overview of the architecture of the four chips.
TI offers software modules, such as video codec implementations, that take advantage of accelerators, and expects that most programmers will access the accelerators through an API.
Orders for the initial offering, the OMAP3503, are being taken now at $19.95 in 10K quantities; delivery is expected in four weeks. TI's OMAP processors as marketed by TI's WTBU have to date been targeted almost exclusively at the wireless handset market. TI offers these new OMAP35x for a broader class of products with wireless connectivity, video and audio capabilities.
A major difference between the WTBU handset-oriented offerings and the new OMAP35x is the packaging. WTBU parts typically are offered in 0.4 mm pitch packaging to meet the extreme size constraints of cell phones, and first delivery of the OMAP3503 will use the 0.4 mm pitch packaging (515-ball PBGA, 12x12 mm). But the new OMAP35xs are also being repackaged into 0.6 mm pitch packages more suitable for general-purpose applications; these 423-ball PGBAs (16x16 mm) will be available in the second quarter of 2008. The resulting reduction in pins dictates that a few features of a few peripherals will not be available in the larger packages.
TI expects its customers to approach these devices by programming in C on the ARM core, which runs Linux and will soon run Windows CE. As discussed in an earlier InsideDSP article, TI expects the Cortex-A8 to handle general application code, and expects the 'C64x+, 2d/3d graphics accelerator, and video accelerator (when present) to handle most graphics and video tasks.
TI is taking orders now for an evaluation module intended to support Linux and Windows CE; it contains among other peripherals a touch-screen LCD, and is expandable with a daughter card for customization by individual developers. (See BDTI's analysis of a TI DaVinci evaluation module.)
TI made a similar introduction some years ago, adding for example the OMAP5910 and OMAP5912 to its catalog product line. Those processors, still in TI's catalog, show overall similarity with WTBU processors such as the OMAP1610, containing an ARM9 and a 'C55x DSP co-processor. These older "catalog OMAP" parts have found some niches, but have not been adopted as widely as TI had hoped. TI believes this is due to the limited on-chip peripherals offered on these chips, and to challenges in programming these parts; TI asserts that it has overcome these challenges with the new OMAP35x parts. How successful they will be will most likely depend largely on how well TI has addressed users' application development challenges.
For BDTI's full analysis of the OMAP 3 Application Processors, see InsideDSP
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