The dual core chip competition is heating up as Texas instruments is announcing their OMAP 4440 chip due to be released to manufacturers mid 2011. The chips will have a dual core Cortex A9 CPU, with each core running at 1.5 Ghz and a PowerVR SGX 540 GPU (the same one in Samsung’s Hummingbird SoC today).
I believe TI’s offering is falling behind competition. While the CPU will be up to par with Tegra 3, Orion, and Qualcomm’s dual core 1.5 Ghz CPU coming in 2nd half next year, I think GPU wise the OMAP 4440 SoC will be way behind. The trend in computing today is to offload more tasks to the GPU from the CPU, so the GPU is becoming more important by the day, while the CPU is becoming less important.
In 2011, we’ll have hardware acceleration for Flash (already exists) on desktops but also on mobiles. We’ll have hardware acceleration for all desktop browsers, but also for the mobile browsers. Android’s UI will be hardware accelerated for a much smoother experience. We’ll have 1280×800 resolution(or higher) for tablets and even for phones, which will need high performance GPU’s to support them. We’ll also see more general computing support in future generations of ARM SoC’s, like Tegra 3, Orion, and the upcoming dual core Qualcomm chips.
And of course how can we forget about gaming. Gaming will becoming big on Android in 2011 – real 3D games that will be ported from consoles and PC’s and optimized to work on tablets and phones. The point is you’ll definitely want not just a powerful CPU, but a very powerful GPU, too. And that is what TI is failing to recognize, and will be releasing a chip that is one generation behind in GPU performance.
Via – AndroidAndMe