Texas Instrument (TI) is coming up with the OMAP4430 system-on-a-chip* (SoC) that should improve every aspect of smartphone/tablet usage, when compared to their previous generation product. TI claims that:
- Web page loading is 30% faster
- Graphics performance is up by 1.25X (that’s not a lot)
- 1080p video is 100% faster (stereo 3D becomes possible)
Additionally, TI has done its best to make the OMAP4440 (somewhat) easy to integrate for existing Texas Instrument customers. Keeping handset makers happy never hurts for TI. The performance claims seem believable, and TI’s competitor NVIDIA has recently published a white paper that shows similar conclusion for web page performance. Note that NVIDIA was the first to unveil a dual Cortex A9 design at CES 2010. It’s clear that there’s enough going on to keep two cores busy, and some are already talking about quad-core SoCs for smartphones. However, you must understand that an SoC like the OMAP4440 contains much more than processing cores. They also include graphics accelerators, video encode/decode hardware that actually do most of the heavy lifting.
*system on a chip: generally called “processors” in the press, system on a chip or SoC, are actually the equivalent of a complete PC motherboard, with multiple co-processors and all. Inside an SoC you generally find general-purpose processors like the Cortex A9, but also dedicated multimedia hardware. The co-processors and dedicated hardware make all the difference in the world. If you removed those multimedia components from the chip design, the user-experience would slow down dramatically, so keep in mind that the Cortex A9 cores alone are *not* representative of the overall performance of the system.
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