OMAP ARMed With Cortex

March 13, 2008

Texas Instruments' latest crop of OMAP processors is based on ARM's 600-MHz superscalar Cortex-A8 core. The 65-nm OMAP35x line includes four chips, starting with a long A8 core and moving up to a C64x DSP/A8 dual-core solution at the high end. The lat

William G. Wong

Texas Instruments' latest crop of OMAP processors is based on ARM's 600-MHz superscalar Cortex-A8 core. The 65-nm OMAP35x line includes four chips, starting with a long A8 core and moving up to a C64x DSP/A8 dual-core solution at the high end. The latter comes complete with 2D/3D OpenGL ES 2.0 support. Running at 300 MHz, the A8 core is comparable to a 600-MHz ARM 9 processor while only consuming 220 mW. Multiple power domains, adaptive voltage scaling, and dynamic power switching are just a few of the features designed to reduce battery requirements. The impressive video support is designed for todayâ??s demanding mobile platforms. It can handle 720p HD streams at 30 frames/s. The OpenGL support can render 10 million polygons/s. Other video features include PIP support and color space conversion. There is a USB 2.0 HS-compliant OTG controller plus two additional host controllers. SDIO, I2C, and flash-memory support round out the peripherals. The chips come in a 16- by 16-mm package. Pricing starts under $20. The OMAP35x EVM development kit costs $1499 with Linux and Windows CE BSPs. www.ti.com

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William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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