Inside Google's Ice Cream Sandwich phones, tablets

From CNET News.com: Texas Instruments will be leading the way on Android 4.0. Its dual-core OMAP4460 chip is inside the Samsung Galaxy Nexus which, in turn, is the launch vehicle for Android 4.0.

This didn't happen overnight. TI and Google have been preparing for this week's Ice Cream Sandwich launch for a while. Google's policy is to work closely with one chipmaker to make sure its software is fully optimized on the chip's feature set.

TI's 4460 in the Galaxy Nexus runs at 1.2GHz and packs Imagination's PowerVR SGX 540 graphics silicon. If its close cousin, the 4430, is any indication, the 4460 is no slouch.

And plenty of horsepower will be needed to push around the pixels in the 1280x720 resolution 4.65-inch Super AMOLED HD displays on phones like the Galaxy Nexus.

Of course, it would be negligent not to mention that Apple's spanking new iPhone 4S uses a dual-core Apple A5 processor running at 800MHz which, like TI's chip, is a design rooted in the ARM architecture.

Don't let the A5's lower gigahertz rating fool you, though, as it benchmarks well on key performance metrics, as will phones based on TI's chip and Ice Cream Sandwich, according to review site Anandtech.

And TI is ready to amp up performance in 2012 when it brings out chips like the 4470.

The 4470 will hit speeds of up to 1.8GHz, a pretty big step up from the 1.2GHz 4460, according to a research note from Linley Gwennap, who heads The Linley Group, a chip consulting firm.

TI has also modified the memory controller to support faster memory, and the 4470 includes a PowerVR SGX544 graphics processing unit (GPU), which TI is also using in OMAP5, the next iteration of its OMAP processor series. "This GPU delivers twice the raw performance of the SGX540 in the earlier OMAP4 chips," according to Gwennap. The 4470 is expected to sample this year and appear in devices in 2012.

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