TI Announces New 1.8-GHz OMAP4470 Chip

The mobile speed race is heating up. With Nvidia demonstrating its upcoming quad core Kal-El CPU and ARM talking about owning half the PC market within 4 years, Texas Instruments has unveiled its next generation mobile chip, the OMAP4470 processor.

The dual-core OMAP4470 will reach clock speeds up to a blazing 1.8-GHz on its ARM Coretex A9 Cores. It will also feature a POWERVR SGX544 graphics core and a hardware composition engine that will speed up multitasking graphics (ex: showing a video in one window while surfing the web in another). The chip will also contain dual ARM Cortex M3 cores to do additional multimedia processing and dual channel 466-MHz memory.

What kind of performance and featurs you expect from OMAP4470-powered devices when they hit the market next year? 

• Faster Browsing: TI claims an 80-percent improvement in web page rendering
• More Screen Real Estate: The processor can drive up to 3 HD screens and support resolutions up to 2048 x 1536). This will allow for more realistic paper-like 300 pixel-per-inch tablets.
• More speed overall: Plenty of power for mobile gaming and media creation, enough to enable to high-end photography or video editing.

TI expects to start sampling the OMAP4470 in the second half of 2011, but end users won’t see it in products until sometime in 2012.