Analysis: OMAP35x brings Cortex-A8 to the mass market

By Berkeley Design Technology Inc.

DSP DesignLine -- (03/12/08, 03:00:00 AM EDT)

In February, Texas Instruments introduced four new members of its OMAP3 family of high-end application processors, and announced that these chips will be offered broadly as part of TI's "catalog" product line.

Like the original OMAP3 chip (the OMAP3430, which remains exclusive to TI's wireless handset chip division), all four of the new OMAP35x chips use the ARM Cortex-A8, a superscalar 32-bit CPU core. (BDTI benchmark results are available for the Cortex-A8). The first of the four chips, OMAP3503, is sampling now with a 600 MHz Cortex-A8.

Given the care with which TI laid out its implementation of the Cortex-A8 core in earlier OMAP processors, and TI's recent announcement of an 800 MHz OMAP3440 (from TI's Wireless Terminal Business Unit (WTBU)), BDTI expects future OMAP35x chips to include faster Cortex-A8 cores.

TI announced that the new OMAP3503 will be complemented by three other processors in the second half of 2008. As shown in the following table, the forthcoming family members incorporate various combinations of coprocessors to augment the ARM core.

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