TI Announces Quad-Core, 2 GHz Smartphone SoC

Texas Instruments (TI) has announced a future smartphone/tablet SoC that could dramatically elevate the processing capability of compact mobile devices.

The spec sheet reads like an all-you-can menu for the digital now. Unfortunately, the new SoC won't arrive for at least 2 years.

The new 28nm OMAP5430 SoC, the flagship of TI's new OMAP5 series, integrates two ARM Cortex-A15 MPCores that can be clocked at up to 2 GHz (each, which would be a total of 4 GHz, if we stay with the current trend that we simply add up the clock speeds of processing cores) as well as two Cortex-M4 cores that are used as accelerators and CPUs that power a device when in low-power/standby mode.

According to TI, the A15 architecture is about 50% faster than the preceding A9 cores and the entire chip is about three times faster than the previous generation (OMAP4, which isn't available yet).

The graphics engine is based on the PowerVR SGX544-MPx core as well as TI's own 2D graphics engine, which are promised to be about five times faster than their predecessors. Users can run 1080p video in 60fps and can convert 2D 1080p video to S3D in 1080p in real time, TI said, and there is enough horsepower support a 2D digital camera with up to 24 megapixels resolution or 12 megapixels in 3D. Just as a reminder, we are talking about a smartphone SoC here. The remaining specs include support for up to 8 GB DDR3 memory, USB 3.0, HDMI 1.4a (3D), and a display resolution of up to 2560x2048 pixels.

Don't get excited just yet. Samples of the SoC may not sample until the second half of this year and devices should be available by 2012 - at the earliest. To us, this seems to be a 2013 product. In the end, we were promised dual-core SoC smartphones for the second half of 2010.