Comments on: TI’s New Chip Ready for Smartphones, Tablets, Even Windows Laptops

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:50:23 +0000

I wasn’t trying to make a point or pass judgment on the A5; I was answering the question on the difference between the chips.

By: pk de cville

pk de cville — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 22:24:48 +0000

This chip’s expected in the 1st 1/2 of 2012 and Apple will probably have the A6 out for Xmas 2012.

Apple’s going to want to pour on the power to be best in class in power, battery life, price, and all the other measures.

By: raycote

raycote — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 22:09:59 +0000

“A5 clock speed tops out at 1 GHz per processing core”

because Apple decided that was the best tipping point between performance and battery life so your point was?

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 21:44:28 +0000

The biggest difference is that this will run in non-Apple devices. ;) I’m joking of course. 30,000 foot view: the current A5 clock speed tops out at 1 GHz per processing core, while this OMAP ramps up to 1.8 GHz per core. On the GPU side, both use a PowerVR SGX 5 series, but the OMAP uses a more current version.

By: pk de cville

pk de cville — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 21:17:40 +0000

Looking at it from 30,000 ft, how does this chip differ from Apple’s A5?

By: Lucian Armasu

Lucian Armasu — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 15:23:21 +0000

It won’t compete with Tegra 2. It will have to compete with Tegra 3 and the dual core Krait from Qualcomm, and both seem more powerful than this. Also, I think Nvidia might keep their 6 month schedule that they first intended for Tegra 2, when they wanted to release Tegra 2 3D, but they didn’t because Tegra 2 appeared so late in “popular” products, and Tegra 3 is coming out soon. But we might see a Tegra 3.5 in tablets early 2012 that will compete with OMAP 4470 and Krait dual core for tablets.

I think TI has already had small reception so far, and I think they’ll only fall further behind. They can’t really seem to keep up with either Nvidia or Qualcomm. I think Nvidia and Qualcomm will be the Intel and AMD of the ARM chip market a couple of years from now.

As a side note about Windows 8, have you noticed that it will use this year’s chips? It’s going to come out late 2012 for Tegra 3, OMAP 4470 and dual core Krait, while I think we’ll see Tegra 4, OMAP 5 and quad core Krait for Android devices around the same time or earlier. It looks like Windows 8 ARM devices will be one generation behind Android devices, just like WP7 phones.