TI announces OMAP 5: two high-performance and two low-power cores, devices next year

Were the Dual core 1GHz processors for phones too much for you? Than how do you feel about 2GHz smartphone processors? We're still waiting for the first OMAP 4 devices to hit the market, but TI's planning ahead -- way ahead -- with its announcement today of the OMAP 5 platform that really kicks things into high gear. The headline feature would be the inclusion of two Cortex-A15 cores, each running at up to 2GHz; Cortex-A15 is the fastest architecture ARM has announced to date, featuring performance roughly 50 percent better than Cortex-A9 at the same clock speed. What's more, there are another two Cortex-M4 processors along for the ride, ready to take over less intensive tasks at much lower power consumption to improve device responsiveness. The platform can support up to four cameras operating at the same time, offer 3D playback, recording, and 2D upsampling to 3D at 1080p resolution, and control up to 8GB of RAM. The chips start sampling to device manufacturers in the second half of this year with retail devices expected in the second half of 2012.

[Technorati Tags: TI, OMAP 5, high-performance, quad core]