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Texas Instruments has written a check for 6.5 billion dollars to acquire a semiconductor manufacturer named National Semiconductor in order to beef up production of their chips. “This acquisition is about strength and growth,” said Rich Templeton, TI’s president and chief executive officer.
TI recently announced a beastly 2GHz quad-core OMAP5. You can also find TI’s dual-core OMAP4 mobile chips in upcoming devices such as the LG Optimus 3D and Blackberry Playbook. Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung better watch out! There’s a storm a brewin’.
[via: Press Release]
:D yay more competition
Seriously. There’s nothing better for consumers than heavy competition in the tech industry! Woot! =D
definitely. . . we need TI to step it up and provide some real competition and more importantly. . . get chips out faster.
Okay, let’s start a betting pool on how long it is before (even though they are in their infancy in Android phones) the dual-cores will be “outdated” and “old” because the quad cores will be out “soon”. I’m going for mid-August. Even if they aren’t released yet.
outdated…maybe, but i think that all the feature phones will be 1ghz single core and all the low end smart phones will be dual core beasts. The quad core will be saved for top tier phones that can truly replace a laptop (my wish).
You misunderstood me. I was being sarcastic. I don’t think it is possible for a company to release a single-core phone without the boards being full of stupid comments like “fail”, “last years tech” etc. This was happening before a dual-core actually hit the market.
it’s not just the number of cores but also things like dual channel memory or the use of DDR3 memory that will make a big difference.
You won’t see quad-core chips in phones till the end of the year. NVIDIA will be first with the Tegra-3 in tablets by August and they stated that phones wont hit the market till the holidays. . . so 2012 will the the year of the quad-core chip.
You misunderstood me. I was being sarcastic. I don’t think it is possible for a company to release a single-core phone without the boards being full of stupid comments like “fail”, “last years tech” etc. This was happening before a dual-core actually hit the market.
EDIT: This post accidentally appeared in thiscomment sub-thread twice. oops
While looking around to see if the OMAP5s have efuse, I came across this in another article ” Texas Instruments (TI) announced a new family of System on a chip (SoC) yesterday which brings with it two chips. The chips will feature four processors, two based on the ARM Cortex-A15 architecture and the other two based on the Cortex-M4 architecture. TI expects sampling to begin in the second half of this year, with release following in the second half of 2012.The Cortex-A15 cores are the best architecture that ARM has to offer right now and are designed for the more intensive work. TI plans to have these cores running at speeds up to 2 GHz.
The Cortex-M4 cores will be relegated to the less resource intensive tasks to help battery life and improve responsiveness.
In addition, multi-core POWERVR SGX544-MPx graphics cores will be included, delivering increasingly powerful 3D graphics capability on larger screens with higher FPS.
The OMAP5430 chip will be targeted at smartphones where space is an issue and the OMAP5432 is designed for use in mobile devices where cost and space is not at such a premium.
“.
Interesting.
Nvidia has gotta a lot of press recently for their tegra chips.. but honestly looking at the benchmarks they’ve definitely got a lot of competition and may potentially have the slowest of all dual core arm architectures.
Do some research. Tegra 2 has been shipping in products since end of August last year. It’s a 7 month old chip already, and by the time the dual core Snapdragon and OMAP 4 are shipping in products, it will be 8-9 months old. That’s almost an entire generation. The quad core Tegra 3 is coming out this August, soon after all their competitors are just getting out their dual core chips.
Oh, and I don’t know why the author makes it sound as if OMAP 5 will be getting out soon, because it won’t. It will start shipping in products end of 2012.
Yea some ppl dont realize the Tegra 2 been out. Wasnt it in the Zune?
Its just new to Android phones.
No, that was Tegra 1.
http://www.slashgear.com/toshiba-ac100-tegra-2-midsmartbook-sneaks-on-sale-2699068/
August 26th last year – the same chip that is now in Xoom.
Yup… it’s been available for a while but i was referring to phones.. and really more about mainstreem phones. The 2x was first and that was really a febuary release.
Actually Tegra 2 chips has been out since the Q4 of 2010 with the Veiwsonic G, then came the Dell Streak 7, then the Atrix, then the Xoom and finally the Optimus 2x(G2x).(Here in the US). So Tegra 2 chips have been out for a while and with Quad core Tegra 3 chips coming around Q3/Q4 the other chip developers better step up there game unless the plan is to balance the idea of phone and tablet with quad core in tablets and dual core in phones since theres no point of having a tablet if the software is going to be the same(Ice Cream) and the hardware internals as well.
Smartphones are a much bigger market than tablets, so apps will be targetting smartphones almost exclusively. There won’t be a quad core smartphone until November at the earliest, so I’m certain dual core devices won’t be anywhere near outdated until then.
yup and even then manufactures like to get people to wait for their next flagship device and over promise on delivery.. just look at the ‘dual core’ phenomenon that occurred.. people (me included) were waiting since november last year and we never saw anything until about feb.
This market is also very competitive so someone will try to be first.
We all cheer and make fun of apple fanboys when we see those good marketshare numbers but what do you think OEM’s are thinking when they see them? Everyone wants to get into this Android game even harder than before.
The OMAP 5 isn’t supposed to be out until mid 2012. Unless it comes out by the end of the year then I will be getting a Tegra 3 phone.
TI buying National Semi. That’s pretty big. I remembered Texas Instruments for their Speak & Spell!
First of all that OMAP 5 quad core chip isn’t even a true quad core chip. It only has 2 main Cortex A15 cores, the other 2 cores are specialized and are just there to help improve touch responsiveness.
Second, Nvidia has nothing to fear, OMAP 5 will be out at the end of 2012. Tegra 4 with a true quad core Cortex A15 CPU will be out by then.
I expect tegra-2 to have the best gpu scores. Nvidia is a graphics first company. Seems like the true niche for a tegra system is in the games.
The tegra2 gpu scores are barely beating out the hummingbird processor scores. for a dual core chip by a graphics company, i’m not all that impressed.
i’m waitin for the samsung orion processors to come out. those things are predicted to tear up any of the dual core processors coming out
Wow, this a pretty big announcement. If you open up ANY electronic device there’s a good chance half the components inside were manufactured by National. This gives them WAY more than a little more manufacturing headroom and will allow them to manufacture just about every cell phone component in-house, from the display and processor down to the resistors.
Lets wait and see what samsung has to offer yet before we crown TI.
The thing is…Ti, like Nvidia go well beyond there cpu/gpu chipsets. Ti with there DLP chips for TV sets. Nvidia for there motherboard chipsets, GPUs and overall advancements in visuals. But Ti is the stronger mathematical company, it will be a fun competition. Its all up to Google to optimize the user experience to utilize these chipsets!