Texas Instruments Announces OMAP 5 Quad Core Chipset for Tablets

The future of your tablet just got brighter. TI’s revolutionary quad core chipset for tablets will provide increased processing performance, lower power consumption, gesture recognition, and stereoscopic 3D video.

Texas Instruments (TI) announced the next of kin in the OMAP family, the OMAP 5 mobile applications platform. The OMAP 5 quad core architecture leverages two ARM Cortex-A15 MPCores, two ARM Cortex-M4 processors, in addition to dedicated engines for video, imaging, vision, DSP, 3D graphics, 2D graphics, display, and security.

OMAP 5 offers up to 3x processing performance and 5x 3D graphics improvement, yet provides a nearly 60% power reduction when compared to the OMAP 4 platform.

“We continue to see high performance mobile devices, such as tablets, requiring increased processor performance while remaining within the restricted mobile power consumption boundaries,” said Mike Inglis, EVP and general manager of the ARM Processor Division.

“The OMAP 5 processor highlights the advantage of the ARM business model. The relationship enables product differentiation through the integration of low power multi-core ARM processor cores with the partners’ own system-on-chip technologies, including power management, audio and video processing. ARM is proud to have contributed to the OMAP 5 platform, which enables OEM customers to leverage the extensive ARM software ecosystem to quickly deliver innovative new mobile solutions.”

Perhaps some of the eye opening points of the OMAP 5 announcements, aside from the quad core technology, would be the push in stereoscopic 3D (S3D) graphics, and more importantly, gesture recognition.

Natural User Interfaces (NUI) are taken to the next level with the OMAP 5 platform, offering advanced support for S3D, gesturing (including proximity sensing), and interactive projection.

We’re talking similar gesture features to that of X-Box Kinect, only more robust.

The OMAP 5 processor can support up to four cameras in parallel, as well as record and playback S3D video in 1080p quality. The new processor can also deliver advanced short and long range gesturing applications, as well as full-body and multi-body interactive festures, leveraging either 2D or S3D cameras.

What’s really cool is that the OMAP 5 processor, coupled with a TI DLP Pico Projector and camera, can also enable interactive projection, where the user can actually “touch and drag” projected images on both a table top or a wall.

With OMAP 5, we’re ALMOST getting to a point where we have the Iron Man scenario. Drop and drag on a projector image out of thin air, and we’re all set. This is the first step in getting there, and its completely exciting.

Here are some of the key features and advantages to the OMAP 5 architecture, when compared to its predecessor, OMAP 4:

Have a look at some of the Texas Instruments videos for the OMAP 5 release and user experiences as well: