We’re only a few months away from the moment we’re supposed to see the first OMAP 5 next-gen chip from Texas Instruments, which is based on a dual core 2 Ghz Cortex A15 CPU and a PowerVR SGX544 GPU, which is overclocked to keep close to the current competition, although from what I’ve seen so far, it will barely match the GPU’s that have already been out for a few months. Also, according to TI themselves in 2010, OMAP 5 was supposed to have a dual core 2.5 Ghz Cortex A15 CPU, not just 2 Ghz.
Something seems to have gone wrong with their chips lately, as they’ve been delayed a lot, or if the chips arrived in time, they had significantly less performance than what they promised earlier. For example the OMAP 4460 was supposed to arrive at 1.5 Ghz this fall, but it arrived at 1.2 Ghz, and only now we’re seeing the 1.5 Ghz version. Also, we were supposed to see the OMAP 4470 by now, but it looks like we won’t see that for a few months either.
Still, the OMAP 5 should be a relatively powerful chip overall compared to the competition, if it does arrive this fall, and it’s not further delayed to early next year. It should also be particularly good at media decoding, as that has been one of TI’s strengths, and they’re using specialized accelerator chips to do that. You can see a demo and more info about the OMAP 5 in this video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on8uzokWpP0