Notion Ink explains choosing TI OMAP over Nvidia’s Tegra for Adam II

Last week, we brought you news about Notion Ink’s decision to go with TI OMAP SoC for the Adam II and apparently, many questions were raised as to why they switched from Tegra 2 to TI OMAP, so much so that they have now issued an official statement, explaining the reason behind the switch. While on paper and in synthetic benchmarks, the GPU in the Tegra 3 may be unbeatable or OMAP’s memory bandwidth may be a lot more than Tegra 3 and Snapdragon, but at the end of the day, its how you utilize that power is what really matters and that’s precisely their argument.

Power efficiency or number of cores?

Their decision to ditch Nvidia’s Tegra 3 for TI OMAP is simply because they feel they can leverage a lot more out of this chipset than the others. If you compare the documentation, number of use-case modeled, white papers and reference documents, TI OMAP comes out on top. This is especially useful, if you’re not a huge corporation like, HTC or Samsung and don’t have millions to spend just on research and development. Besides, Bangalore which is where Notion Ink is based out off, hosts plenty of ex-TI professionals who actually helped built OMAP, so who better to help with the development than those guys.

Another very good reason for going with TI OMAP is better battery life. Nvidia’s Tegra 3 may have four cores, but it’s still built using the 40nm fabrication process, while TI’s new OMAP 5 chips will be using the much smaller 28nm fabrication process. Not only will this be cheaper to produce and sell to potential manufacturers, it’s also going to consume a hell of a lot less power, so battery life is going to be a lot better. We’ll keep you posted on further developments of the Adam II, as and when we learn about them.