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Losing precious ground to the likes of Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and device manufacturers choosing to develop their own processors rather than purchase them from a third party, Texas Instruments has announced that they are backing out of the smartphone and tablet market as they refocus their chip production efforts. Instead, TI will shift attention towards industrial clients, including carmakers, with the hope to create a better bottom line for the business. Investors don’t seem to agree, as shares fell 3 precent in light of TI providing no real roadmap for how the company plans to move forward.
While the chipmaker will continue to support its current hardware partners, TI says they will significantly reduce their investment in future smartphones and tablets, likely spelling an end to the OMAP series of processors as we know it. While OMAP chips will continue to exist in one for or another, they won’t be powering our smartphones and tablets much longer. No specific timeframe was given for the pullback, however.
[via Reuters]
This actually makes me really sad. I was hoping for a homerun with Omap 5 cortex a-15’s
They did this to themselves: they waited some two years from announcing the OMAP 5 to when they planned on releasing it, and now they’re not going to release it at all. If they had had it ready on a more reasonable timeframe like Q1 or Q2 of this year, they would probably be the number two SoC maker by now.
Damn, we have lost a good open-source ARM chip. Now we gotta rely on Qualcomm for open source chips.
Move away from the future of technology? Makes sense.
omap wasn’t a future tech. a new mobile arch needs to be developed.
Right, but they said they were moving away from mobile…not just OMAP.
That’s to bad cause the Tegra chips are pretty weak compared to other offerings, and the OMAP series was pretty damn power efficient.
Ughhh please see the Galaxy Nexus, worst battery life I’ve ever experienced
You probably had the CDMA/Verizon version and yeah, that version had pretty bad battery life. The GSM Galaxy Nexus is a different story.
Motorola doesn’t hane an efficency problem with them, Maybe its just Samsung.
what are you talking about? My stock GSM Gnex with stock 1750mah battery lasts all day. on moderate usage I have about 30-40% left and on heavy days around 10-15%.
Use the Minco ROM, I still have like 50% after a full day of heavy use
I’ve been roming since I got my Hero when it first came out. JB is actually the time I haven’t felt the need to rom. I stuck CM10 on my GFs Galaxy S4G and its nice but I just think that with 4.1 android feels complete.
Hmm my GSM Nexus battery is quite good actually
Mine is VZW Gnex and I don’t have battery issue after 4.04 and it got even better after JB update. Just don’t use Google now, latitude and battery will be fine.
Is Google Now really that much of a battery hog? Since I flashed Bugless Beast on my Nexus, I’ve always had it on. Maybe I should do some testing and see how much of a difference having it off makes..
If I’m not mistaken Galaxy Nexus which I own its not the processor its the display that eats the battery.
Hmmm. I think this is a mistake. Mobile device platforms are only going to continue growing. Smartphones haven’t saturated the market yet, especially in places like India where the potential is massive. And as society move forward more and more is going to be done on portable electronics. I think TI should have looked for ways to increase efficiency and tried to find a few secure partnerships just to stay in the game.
I’m sure that the OMAP5 will still come out.
WTH is that kind of reaction to competition? Oh there are two new competitors so we back off ?!?!
Well that’s retarded! So goodbye ARM-64 development?
Smart Business if you ask me in a market where manufacturers are narrowing down how many they make an overcrowded market isn’t good they already have a great base for full size so why stay in a crowded room where you aren’t getting much attention
Google, buy Texas Instruments mobile processor division! Its a great CPU. Google could build its own chips for their Motorola devices. Just like what Apple does with their Ax chips for iPhone & Ipad. Go get it Google!
It’s sad if this means there won’t be OMAP5 in next Nexus or any android phone.
Sad to see competition leave, but TI really never made any high end chips, they always put weak GPU’s in their OMAP 3 and 4 series. The 5 series may have had an okay GPU, but I didn’t get the feeling it was going to be impressive. Now we might never know though unless they do decide to bring it to production.
That sucks I wanted to see the new omap 5 in devices this holiday season but whatever now maybe we Android fiends can hope Google ask Samsung for Exynos 5250 CPU with Mali-T604 GPU in the Next Nexus please Google do it I will BUY in a heartbeat
Sad day for developers. The one open source SoC is out of business… ROM developers are gonna curse this day.