With the laptop revolution reaching saturation, it is the time for the connected mobile computing in the form of smart phones and MID (mobile internet devices). With high speed mobile internet taken for granted after the advent of 3G and 4G networks, people would like to make full use of the connected computing devices. In this juncture, Application Processor (AP) has a huge market in terms of revenue. Several firms are jumping into the AP market and each company is uniquely placed with their IP in APs. But one company which shows a differentiation in the mobile battery powered devices is the OMAP AP maker Texas Instruments. Having a lion’s share (65%) in this market space, they know what it takes to make a better application processor for battery powered devices. Having introduced the 3rd generation APs and already spinning out powerful 4th generation AP they are better placed with their vast experience in their AP based platform solution for smart phones.
With TI’s competitors simply improving the speed (in simple words: higher the CPU speed, more is the power drain from the battery) of the ARM core without giving any consideration to power management, it is a bad omen for the industry that companies including Apple’s iPhone embrace these platform solution. User experience does include the power management and no user wants to see his phone’s battery drained sooner than his expectation. Here the TI’s unique “heterogeneous core” AP platform solution is standing out in this market space. TI having tightly integrated the ARM core and DSP processor on the same chip (including hardware and it supporting complete embedded software solution includes MM, Graphics, BSP, and Connectivity) have some unique advantageous compared to it s competitor both in terms of power management and CPU speed. DSP which is well suited for all Multimedia related activities is the best to perform all the codec/signal processing related activities compared to ARM both in terms of speed and performance. It is not the simple usage of dedicated DSP that matters here, but it is how it is integrated with the ARM core and made to have a seamless communication with ARM core, which TI does it, best in class.
TI’s solution also adds the additional flexibility of integrating co-processors to buy additional cpu power, if needed. What Intel is trying with its Atom AP is making using of its powerful x86 processor architecture(around 1Ghz) but completely failing in terms of power budget and so is Snapdragon from QCom as well as nVidia's solution making use of Intel's Atom processor with their powerful graphics processor. It is understandable what to expect from a company like Intel with little to no experience in battery powered mobile devices.
The ultimate winner apart from the user experience is better power management. What one can achieve with one heterogeneous core (ARM=700 MHz /DSP =600 MHz) from the TI’s OMAP is manifold than that of its competitors solution. The advantage of having a dedicated DSP to perform all MM related activity is not stopped their. Now you have the idle ARM processor that can be put into use for some other multi-tasking application when the DSP is silently performing the computational intensive MM related activities. Hope iPhone and Blackberry makers seize the potential advantage of the TI’s platform solution over other. It is not always the case “single is powerful” and it is how multiple cores are put into use in computing world. Though the “hardware codecs” are the best in class but you don’t need one when there is an intelligent platform solution like OMAP from TI. Thus apart form the performance it buys some cost benefits to the iPhones and Blackberries makers and thus lessening the burden on to the customer. After all, what the customer wants is a satisfactory max 25-30fps AV playback and recording (includes HD videos), including internet based MM content.
