Texas Instruments Announce Quad-Core Smartphone Processor

Texas Instruments today announced they’re working on the OMAP5430, the flagship processor of the future OMAP5 series. The SoC will be clocked at 2GHz and will be a quad-core processor with two ARM Cortex-A15 cores, based on a 28nm process, and two Cortex-M4 cores. The chip will be powerful enough to play 1080p videos, even those in stereoscopic 3D, and can even convert 2D videos to stereoscopic 3D – all this without dropping frames. It will support resolutions of upto 2560x2048, HDMI 1.4a, USB 3.0, SATA 2.0 and upto 8GB of DDR3 memory.

The World on a chip

The A15 cores are said to be much faster than the A9s. Funnily enough, TI are touting the chip to be much faster than the OMAP4… which hasn’t released yet. Yeah, they’ve gone and announced a much faster chipset when their newest lineup hasn’t even hit the shelves yet.

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Anyway, even though the OMAP5 looks to be quite awesome, don’t get your hopes up yet. Products using this chip won’t be releasing anytime soon, with samples only scheduled to go out to manufacturers in the second half of 2011 and products will be at least a further year and a half or so away, which could mean a 2012/2013 release.

Considering we only broke the 2GHz barrier on a comparatively massive desktop processor a decade or so ago, maybe it is time for the world to end after all.