Texas Instruments on Monday formally announced its new OMAP [open multimedia application platform] 5 system-on-chip that (SoC) will integrate up to four ARM cores in addition to a number of special-purpose hardware devices. The SoC, which will be made using 28nm fabrication process, will, among other things, support stereo-3D graphics.

The OMAP 5 processor leverages two ARM Cortex-A15 MPCores capable of speeds of up to 2GHz per core in the OMAP 5 implementation. The Cortex-A15 cores are said to deliver a 50% boost in performance over the Cortex-A9 core (at the same clock frequency), support up to 8GB of memory and hardware virtualization. The processor also includes two ARM Cortex-M4 processors for offloading real-time processing from the Cortex-A15 cores to improve low-level control and responsiveness of mobile devices. The OMAP 5 processor includes individual, dedicated engines for: video, imaging and vision, DSP, 3D graphics, 2D graphics, display and security.

The SoC, which will be made using 28nm process technology, is projected to deliver three times processing performance and five-fold 3D graphics improvement, yet provide a nearly 60% average power reduction compared to the OMAP 4 platform.

The OMAP 5 processor includes hardware and software resources that enable the development and deployment of such algorithms, such as camera stabilization, motion blur reduction, noise reduction, high dynamic range and face-based processing. The new processor also goes a step further by using the same OMAP 5 hardware resources with vision algorithms to extract features and data from the picture, in order to implement applications such as face recognition, object recognition and text recognition. These vision capabilities can also be used as the foundation for many different and exciting augmented reality applications.

"The next decade will bring a revolution in mobile computing, as devices continue to converge, attempting to become one single device that meets all of our computing, entertainment, and complex day-to-day needs and interests. However, the bridge to true mobile computing enablement was missing until today. The OMAP 5 platform will be at the heart of driving the mobile computing revolution by delivering the highest computing, graphics and multimedia performance possible within the low power budget required by mobile form factors," said Remi El-Ouazzane, vice president of OMAP platform business unit at TI.

The OMAP 5 is aimed at smartphones, tablets and other mobile form-factors.

Tags: Texas Instruments, TI, Stereo 3D, OMAP