Texas Instruments Demonstrates New OMAP 5 Platform

Thanks to Engadget for the picture.

Seems like Exynos lost this battle if you ask me. TI just debuted and demonstrated their OMAP 5 platform which brings a whole boat load of goodies, which Nvidia can't reach and Samsung dream of. They introduced the new dual GPU architecture which was able to play back 720p video at 30 fps and 1080p at 64 fps. But what's astounding is that it can play 1080p playback at 134 fps without screen refresh limitations.Plus it seems that the two cores for the CPU are capable of running up to 2 GHz (atleast according to their website).The reference model shown above is running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0.1) and from other tech websites it seems to run smooth which already shows its capabilities. Texas Instruments' Remi El-Ouazzane  said that we should expect Windows 8 laptops and Ultrabooks running the OMAP 5 in 2013. As Remi El-Ouazzane quotes:

   "This is the greatest platform on Earth right now... way ahead of Apple, and it's the first Cortex-A15 (which runs 2x faster than the Cortex-A9) product on the market. When running two Cortex-A15 chips at 800MHz, it's more or less the same performance as running two Cortex-A9s at 1.5GHz. You'll see [commercially available products] ramping up with this stuff in late 2012 or early 2013. We are also running Windows 8 on the latest OMAP; it runs perfectly well, and we've been working very closely with Microsoft. We're working on multiple form factors -- tablets, thin-and-lights -- and we think ARM is going to bring tablets to the masses."


In my opinion the only advantage that Nvidia still has is in its cores. Take for example their Tegra 3 platform which has 4 cores and good graphics performance. But cores doesn't always mean better. Just take a look at Intel and AMD. AMD has 8 cores in their CPU's, but in benchmarks its nothing compared to the Intel Core i7 which has 4 cores and has 8 virtual cores. Basically what I'm trying to say is that it's all in the architecture. If it's bad then you won't get good real life performance, if its good you will get better benchmarks, better user experience etc. But only time will tell if this will be the new "god-chip".  But of course what I'm waiting for is for these chips to make their way in to our graphing calculators (Minecraft anyone?).