If we take a look back at the past 30+ years of computing we can honestly say one technological advancement has constantly driven computing forward, that one thing is the microprocessor. Intel has led much of this computing revolution creating the world’s fastest microprocessors for computers. Today, bringing faster and more powerful microprocessors beyond computers and to mobile devices is the central focus of many. This time however Intel is not leading the charge.
Texas Instruments told us they were more interested in showing what their OMAP processors could do than telling us, and the TI booth at MWC 2011 was bristling with vendors showing what they'd coaxed out of OMAP4 chipsets. Video conferencing companies Pathpartner and Ittiam shared a stand with their offerings, the former pushing 720p HD Skype calls, the latter four-way video calls in which only a single participant need have an OMAP4-based device.
Read The Full Story
When we caught up with LG earlier today, to check out the freshly announced Optimus 3D and Optimus Tab, we couldn't help but wonder about the discrepancy between the smartphone's 1080p Full HD 3D recording capabilities and the tablet's 720p HD 3D recording. Turns out, there's more to a 1GHz, dual-core chipset than just its ARM cores: the Optimus 3D's Texas Instruments OMAP4430 has native support for Full HD recording in 3D, while the NVIDIA Tegra 2 in the Tab doesn't.
Read The Full Story
Texas Instruments was showing gesture recognition back at MWC 2010, but with OMAP4 the system has really come of age. The chipset - to be found at the heart of the LG Optimus 3D and the BlackBerry PlayBook - uses the camera support to track hand and arm movements; TI showed a demo where a Blaze developer unit could respond to waves to navigate through a photo gallery.
Video demo after the cut
Read The Full Story
Soon, we may see the kind of interactive screen that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report, thanks to Texas Instruments. Texas Instruments is combining its new OMAP 5 platform with its DLP pico projectors and a camera. This would add hardware support for stereoscopic 3D, and would support full body gesturing, so that the user can touch, drag and drop projected images onto any surface.
Read The Full Story
Texas Instruments has officially announced the TI OMAP 5 platform, the company's latest multi-core chipset complete with two 28nm ARM Cortex-A15 MPCores running at up to 2GHz. The new OMAP5430 and OMAP5432 processors offer up to 3x the performance of the previous-gen OMAP4430, with support for Kinect-style gesture recognition, 5x the graphics performance, and the ability to drive up to four simultaneous displays.
Read The Full Story
Texas Instruments may have been pipped to the post by NVIDIA when it came to getting an OMAP 4 chipset out the door, but it seems the company is leading the way in fancy calculators. Spotted crossing the FCC is the TI-Nspire CX Navigator, a WiFi b/g adapter intended for Texas Instrument's TI-Nspire range of "learning handhelds" (as fancy calculators are now known).
Read The Full Story
Texas Instruments has admitted that NVIDIA beat it to the punch with Tegra 2, managing to scoop up much of the CES 2011 processor hype despite having less than a three month lead to to market over TI's own OMAP 4 chips. Questioned during the company's investor relations call as to how TI envisaged OMAP 4 prospects in the light of NVIDIA's market share, the company conceded its rival is "the player" to beat, but says it has its own customers waiting in the wings.
Read The Full Story
Texas Instruments has confirmed that it is their silicon at the heart of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, RIM's upcoming 7-inch tablet which we played with last week. Brian Carlson, TI's product line manager, told EETimes that the PlayBook uses the 1GHz dual-core OMAP4430, the same chip that's at the heart of the TI Blaze developer device.
Read The Full Story
Microsoft has used the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 to confirm a pretty big rumor that cropped up a few weeks ago. With talk that Windows would be using a System on a Chip Architecture for its next version of Windows, there was plenty of speculation, and even more arguments breaking out whether or not Microsoft would go down this route. Turns out that they are.
Read The Full Story
Texas Instruments has announced the company's brand new DLP Pico HD chipset, which is meant to usher in a new era of high definition entertainment. The chipset makes it possible to showcase video at WXGA resolution, no matter what the surface area is where the video is being displayed. Texas Instruments isn't announcing the new chipset on their own, though -- they've partnered with other companies to make it a more official unveiling, as well as to show off the adoption.
Read The Full Story
Texas Instruments has announced its latest mobile processor, the TI OMAP4440, a SoC packaging a pair of 1.5GHz ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPUs along with two ARM Cortex-M3 cores to power-efficiently offload time-critical and control tasks. Coupled with the POWERVR 3D graphics engine, that provides a quoted 1.25x increase in graphics performance (including 2x faster HD video playback, with support for 1080p60 and 3D stereoscopic 1080p) and a 30-percent cut in webpage loading times.
Read The Full Story
