Analysis: Dual Cortex-A9 cores figure drive OMAP 4

BDTI
(03/30/2009 11:13 PM EDT)

Texas Instruments recently announced its next-generation application processor family, OMAP 4. The OMAP 4 chip family targets smart phones and mobile internet devices (MIDs) and incorporates a number of distinct processing engines.

General-purpose processing is provided via a dual-core SMP processor based on two ARM Cortex-A9 cores, both of which include the NEON multimedia extensions. As shown in Figure 1 below, OMAP 4 chips also include an imaging engine (TI’s ISP), graphics engine (Imagination Technologies’ POWERVR SGX540), programmable video engine (TI’s IVA3) and “audio backend engine” (TI’s ABE).