OMAP roadmap
TI has been developing its OMAP (open multimedia application platform) family for ten years and we got a chance to speak to its first ever European OMAP employee - Eric Mazzoleni (pictured) - who heads up OMAP and connectivity products for TI in EMEA. He concurred that the launch of the iPad was a "big story" for the industry.
We asked him what he thought of Apple entering the SoC market with its A4 chip. Mazzoleni didn't seem to worried about Apple as a direct competitor and that's no great surprise. While TI would have liked to have seen one of its OMAP chips inside the iPad, it's highly unlikely Apple will go chasing after any of TI's existing customers.
Stressing it was just his opinion, Mazzoleni said "We believe it's a Cortex A9." He went on to identify the 10-hour battery life as a key claim and said the iPad is a strong endorsement of TI's strategy for OMAP - for it to drive a wide variety of smart devices.
"We look at the market from a user-experience standpoint," said Mazzoleni. "We are the performance leader across many mobile operating systems, including Android, and we provide the platform to help them differentiate."
Mazzoleni highlighted the Motorola Droid - called Milestone in the UK - which runs on the ARM Cortex A8 based OMAP 3430 and also features Imagination Technology's PowerVR SGX 530 graphics core, as a good exemplar of what TI chips can do, but quite a lot of other devices also use that chip, including the Nokia N900.
Incidentally, TI first announced the OMAP 4 series - which has an ARM Cortex A9 based dual-core CPU core and PowerVR SGX 540 graphics - at last year's Mobile World Congress. Here's a TI slide summarising the performance improvements from one generation of OMAP to the next.
