TI to ship dual-core smartphone chip by year end

From InfoWorld: Texas Instruments on Monday said it will start shipping a new dual-core chip for devices like smartphones and tablets later this year.

The OMAP4430 chip will deliver double the performance of existing single-core chips from the OMAP3 family. This will allow applications to run faster on mobile devices, said Robert Tolbert, director of product management for the OMAP smartphone business at TI.

The chip will also bring features like 1080p high-definition video playback to mobile devices, Tolbert said. It will operate at a clock speed of up to 1GHz and draw up to 50 percent less power than its predecessors.

Many of the chip's improvements come from a new processor design being implemented in OMAP4430, Tolbert said. The chip is based on Arm's latest Cortex-A9 processor design, while TI's earlier OMAP3 chips are based on Cortex-A8. Motorola's recently released Droid X phone, for example, uses the Cortex OMAP3630, which is based on Cortex-A8.

Devices with the dual-core chip will also be able to deliver 10 hours of 1080p video playback compared to OMAP3630's four hours of 720p video playback. The new chip can play more than 15 hours of 720p video.

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