Two years ago ARM Holdings announced their new architecture that would replace the Cortex-A9 CPU core found in most of today’s Android phones and tablets. Codenamed Project Eagle, the new Cortex-A15 CPU was dubbed an “Intel killer” since it was designed for a wide range of devices, including low-power servers, and boasted speeds up to [...]]]>

Two years ago ARM Holdings announced their new architecture that would replace the Cortex-A9 CPU core found in most of today’s Android phones and tablets. Codenamed Project Eagle, the new Cortex-A15 CPU was dubbed an “Intel killer” since it was designed for a wide range of devices, including low-power servers, and boasted speeds up to 2.5 GHz.

Eric Schorn, VP of Processor Marketing ARM, said that A15 is “The biggest thing ARM has ever done, the degree of commitment is truly phenomenal. It’s like taking a desktop and putting it in your pocket.”

As most Android fans know, new phones come out every other week and it’s a difficult choice knowing when to upgrade your device. However, we only see a new CPU architecture released every 2-3 years. For this very reason, many of us have been waiting to see who releases the first chip with an ARM Cortex-A15 CPU core.

NVIDIA, Samsung, ST Ericsson, Texas Instruments and a few smaller players have all confirmed or hinted at new parts based on Cortex-A15, so it’s been exciting to watch them compete and see who can come to market first.

Based on all the information we gathered at CES and Mobile World Congress earlier this year, it has become clear that Samsung will be the first company with a chip that includes Cortex-A15. The average consumer doesn’t care what processor is inside their phone, but if you do then read on to brush up on the latest details.

Enter the Exynos 5250

Regular readers of the site are probably familiar with Samsung’s Exynos 5250. It was first announced last year and processor nerds like me have been obsessed with it ever since.

Back in January we were the first to reveal some of the details about the Exynos 5250 when we interviewed an executive from Samsung LSI at CES. They told us that Exynos 5250 would feature dual-core 2 GHz Cortex-A15 CPUs (that we already knew), but they surprised us with the news that it would feature an ARM Mali-T604 GPU.

Some people doubted our info about the Mali-T604 GPU, but this week Charlie Demerjian of SemiAccurate confirmed the details with a leaked slide from the Common Platform technology forum. There wasn’t anything we didn’t already know in the slide, but we felt it was a good chance to take a closer look at the Exynos 5250.

Samsung’s 32nm HKMG process technology

The move from 45nm to 32nm reduces power consumption.

Samsung’s main advantage over the competition is that they own their own fabs where these processors are produced. Other companies like NVIDIA or Qualcomm are fabless and outsource their production to companies like TSMC or Global Foundries.

Most of Samsung’s mobile application processors are produced in Korea, but they just spent $3.6 billion to upgrade their fab in Austin, TX to boost capacity. Recent rumors suggest that the Austin fab is currently producing Apple’s A5 chip for the iPhone, but we believe they are also producing the Exynos 5250.

Since Samsung has their own fabs, they use a different process technology to produce their chips. Their latest process node is 32nm High-k Metal Gate (HKMG), which reduces power consumption. This is the industry’s first HKMG process.

I won’t pretend to know what all of this means, but the benefits of 32nm HKMG include:

• 2x gate density increase (Superior area scaling with Gate-First HKMG)
• >100x lower gate leakage
• >40% delay improvement at fixed leakage
• ~10x leakage reduction at fixed speed

ARM Cortex-A15 CPU core

“The ARM Cortex-A15 brings unparalleled performance to our Exynos processor family and the exploding mobile marketplace,” said Dojun Rhee, vice president of System LSI marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics. “Designers need an application processor platform that delivers full high definition multimedia capabilities, fast processing speed and high performance graphics to meet end users expectation for a connected life on the go. The advanced low-power, high-performance processor technology of the new Exynos 5250 continues to deliver an unprecedented level of performance for users to enjoy a completely new mobile experience.”

So how fast exactly is Cortex-A15? It is capable of processing 14 billion instructions per second (DMIPS, Dhrystone million instructions per second) at 2.0 GHz. That’s almost double the performance over a current Cortex-A9-based dual core processor running at 1.5 GHz, capable of 7,500 DMIPS. It also means it should be faster than Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon S4 and NVIDIA’s Tegra 3.

Memory bandwidth has been increased to a staggering 12.8 Gigabytes per second (GB/s). Once again, that is double the 6.4 GB/s maximum found in current dual-core Cortex-A9 processors.

For even more nerdy details, head over to ARM’s official documentation on Cortex-A15.

ARM Mali-T604 GPU core

No consumer devices have used the ARM Mali-T604 GPU, so we don’t have a lot to compare it with. However, Samsung says it will offer about a 400% improvement over the current Mali-400 GPU found in the current Galaxy S II models.

Massimiliano Villani, Senior Manager Mobile Marketing for Samsung, said “We benchmarked several GPUs and we found that the overall architecture of the Mali family provided by ARM is nowadays the best in class for GPU performance.”

One of the main benefits of the faster GPU is the ability to drive super high resolution displays. Exynos 5250 supports resolutions up to WQXGA (2560×1600), which is similar territory to the new iPad retina displays (produced by Samsung).

Exynos 5250 is also equipped with embedded Display Port (eDP) interface, compliant with panel self refresh (PSR) technology. This technology instructs the application processor not to send image data to the LCD panel when the set is displaying still image, reducing power consumption.

If you are a graphics freak, check out ARM’s official documentation on Mali-T604.

Coming to a tablet or smartphone near you?

Some may remember that I wrote Samsung would unveil the rumored Galaxy Tab 11.6 at Mobile World Congress, which didn’t happen. That prediction came from a prototype device I saw at CES, but the rumor actually goes back to last year. We don’t know exactly when it will happen, but we still believe Samsung will introduce a next-gen Galaxy Tab with a dual-core 2 GHz Exynos 5250 sometime this year.

I think the more interesting story is what happens with the Galaxy S III. This flagship device has long been rumored to use Samsung’s quad-core Exynos 4412, but I’m not so sure if that will happen. It doesn’t make much sense to me to use a chip that features the older Cortex-A9 CPU and Mali-400 GPU when Samsung is on the verge of releasing their first Cortex-A15 part.

In our recent Android Rumors Report, I said there was about a 50% chance the Galaxy S III would use Exynos 4412 and a 50% chance it would use Exynos 5250. Having thought about it some more, I’d say the odds are actually much greater that the Galaxy S III will feature Exynos 5250.

Samsung’s official Exynos 5250 documentation reveals that the part will initially come in two versions. One is clocked at 2 GHz (for tablets), and the other is clocked at 1.7 GHz (for smartphones).

In the Cortex-A15 video above, Yiwan Wong, VP SoC Marketing Group, Samsung Electronics, said “We believe this new core will be the enabler for many exciting next-generation mobile products, such as smartphones and mobile computing devices.”

Earlier this year I wrote, “One not so far off possibility for the Galaxy S III could be the Exynos 5250. This part is slated for the second-half of 2012, but Samsung could leap-frog the competition with the first mobile device to feature the next-generation ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and ARM Mali-T604 GPU. This would require a delay of the Galaxy S III from its normal summer release schedule, but it’s the choice I’d make if I was in charge.”

We now know from a recent earnings call that Samsung’s Exynos 5250 will enter mass production in Q2, so I’m not really sure they would need to delay the Galaxy S III that much. This is the same company that re-engineered the original Galaxy Tab 10.1 in one month, to make it thinner than the iPad 2.

Seeing that Apple went with their A5X chip (dual-core A9) in their new iPad, it makes even more sense that Samsung would make an effort to one up their rival. Now every time a month passes and we hear nothing official about the Galaxy S III, it increases the chances they are going with Exynos 5250.

If that turns out to be true, then I wouldn’t want to purchase a smartphone right now that could be virtually obsolete within a couple months.

Several months ago it looked like Samsung would unveil their 2012 flagship products at Mobile World Congress, but then the Korean company decided to hold off. Now Samsung has said they will announce the successor to the Galaxy S II (and maybe the rumored Galaxy Tab 11.6) sometime in the first half of [...]]]>

Several months ago it looked like Samsung would unveil their 2012 flagship products at Mobile World Congress, but then the Korean company decided to hold off. Now Samsung has said they will announce the successor to the Galaxy S II (and maybe the rumored Galaxy Tab 11.6) sometime in the first half of the year, closer to commercial availability of the products.

For what it’s worth, I agree with Samsung’s new strategy. By avoiding the Mobile World Congress circus, consumers are still talking about the rumored Galaxy S III more than any other device that recently got announced. Using our buyer’s guides as evidence, Samsung still offers the best Android phone on every major US carrier and there is no need to rush out new devices.

When the time finally comes for the rumored Galaxy S III and Galaxy Tab 11.6, Samsung is poised to offer best in class processing and graphics performance. With their new Exynos 5250 system-on-a-chip, Samsung should be the first to utilize ARM’s new Cortex-A15 CPU core and Mali-T604 GPU. The chip goes into mass production next quarter and the CPU+GPU combination is expected to trounce anything else available at the time.

Samsung’s biggest competitor is Apple, so they are eagerly waiting on the big iPad 3 (or iPad HD?) announcement tomorrow to see how they will respond. Last year Samsung re-designed the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the span of one month to be thinner than the iPad 2, and I assume they will be trying to top Apple again.

Apple’s latest tablet is expected to feature a 9.7 inch retina display with 2048 x 1536 resolution, but Samsung also has their own next-gen display with 2560 × 1600 resolution (WXQGA).

There are all kinds of rumors about Apple’s next processor, possibly called the A6 or A5x. Speculation suggest it will either be a quad-core Cortex-A9 part, or maybe even a dual-core Cortex-A15 part. Apple has always been a leader in graphics performance using technology from Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR series, and that is expected to continue.

However, Samsung seems pretty confident in sticking with ARM-designed GPUs. In an interview with ARM blogger Katie Morgan, Samsung boasted about their upcoming Exynos processors. Massimiliano Villani, Senior Manager Mobile Marketing for Samsung, said “We benchmarked several GPUs and we found that the overall architecture of the Mali family provided by ARM is nowadays the best in class for GPU performance.”

Villani didn’t specify which ARM GPU would be used in the Exynos 5250, but we already reported from CES that Samsung is going with the Mali-T604. This GPU delivers up to 5x performance improvement over previous Mali graphics processors and is scalable up to 4 cores.

Hopefully, we will learn more details about Samsung’s upcoming products soon. Samsung just revealed some kind of special announcement for March 9th, but we think that is too soon to talk about any new flagship products.

I know I’ll be following Apple’s big event tomorrow to see what gets announced. Do you think it’s important for Samsung to try and beat Apple in GPU performance, or should they focus their efforts in other areas?

Today chipmaker Marvell announced that their new Foresight Platform, powered by the Marvell Armada 1500 HD Media system-on-a-chip (SoC), has been designed into the next generation of Google TVs expected to debut at CES 2012. Google was widely expected to reveal the second generation of Google TV devices at last year’s CES, but they [...]]]>

Today chipmaker Marvell announced that their new Foresight Platform, powered by the Marvell Armada 1500 HD Media system-on-a-chip (SoC), has been designed into the next generation of Google TVs expected to debut at CES 2012. Google was widely expected to reveal the second generation of Google TV devices at last year’s CES, but they decided to pull the plug and reboot Google TV.

This is a significant change for Google TV devices, since the first wave of products from Logitech and Sony were powered by Intel’s Atom processor. The move to the ARM-based Marvell processor should help reduce the initial cost of the new TVs and set top boxes that will be announced.

Companies expected to announce new Google TV devices include LG, Samsung, Sony and Vizio. Samsung recently released a teaser video for their new Smart TVs that you can see below.

We don’t know a whole lot about the Armada 1500 SoC, so it will be interesting to see how it performs. Ganesh TS of Anandtech does a pretty good job of breaking down the technical details of the Armada 1500, which includes a dual-core 1.2 GHz PJ4B CPU core (similar performance to ARM Cortex-A9) and a Vivante GC1000 GPU core. Vivante currently produces two sets of GPU cores: one targeted at mobile devices (like the Ainovo Novo7) and one for home entertainment devices.

Marvell says their Foresite Platform is designed to “deliver superior 3D video, impressively rich audio, striking 3D graphics and TV-friendly Web content.” The original Intel Atom processor did a pretty good job with most of these tasks, but I found that web browsing and 3D graphics performance were lacking.

Google’s Eric Schmidt recently said that the majority of new TVs will have Google TV embedded by the summer, which was a pretty bold prediction. With a new low-cost ARM platform and LG, Samsung, Sony, and Vizio on board, it looks like Google has a good chance to make that come true.

I’ve been the owner of the Logitech Revue since it launched a couple years ago, and even though it flopped I was happy with my purchase. The recent software update to Android 3.2 that added the Android Market greatly enhanced the user experience and the apps are slowing starting to trickle in. Google says there are already more than 150 apps optimized for Google TV and we should see that number expand as these new products hit the market.

We expect to see most of these new Google TV devices next week at CES, so check back for some hands-on reports.

Could you imagine an Android device with 10x faster graphics and 70% longer battery life? It sounds like some kind of dream device we might see by 2013 or 2014, but recent comments from ARM suggest this could happen as early as next year.

Last week ARM announced the latest member of their GPU [...]]]>

Could you imagine an Android device with 10x faster graphics and 70% longer battery life? It sounds like some kind of dream device we might see by 2013 or 2014, but recent comments from ARM suggest this could happen as early as next year.

Last week ARM announced the latest member of their GPU family, the Mali-T658. This next generation GPU promises 10 times the performance of the ARM Mali-400 found in the Galaxy S II by doubling the number of GPU cores, doubling the number of arithmetic pipelines within each core, and improving the compiler and pipeline efficiency.

Many industry insiders were expecting to see this Mali-T658 GPU arrive in 2013, but Edvard Sørgård, ARM consultant graphics architect, says we should expect to see it in stores next year (which I assume means consumer devices).

ARM announced that the launch partners for the Mali-T658 GPU included Fujitsu Semiconductor, LG Electronics, Nufront and Samsung. Only Samsung has launched an Android device with an ARM Mali GPU, so we think they would be most likely to be one of the first to put the Mali-T658 into an Android device.

Samsung previously said they would deliver an Exynos processor that leverages both the Cortex-A7 and big.Little technology in 2012 and the ARM Mali-T658 would be the perfect GPU to pair with that combo. The Mali-T658 GPU takes advantage of ARM CoreLink Cache Coherent Interconnect (CCI-400) technology, enabling faster and more efficient sharing of data with other processors in the system.

So, as crazy as it sounds, Samsung should technically be able to deliver a 28nm quad-core Exynos processor in 2012 with two Cortex-A15 cores, two Cortex-A7 cores and a Mali-T658 GPU. That might be a little ambitious for next year, but Samsung has quickly become a leader in the mobile system-on-a-chip industry and I think they can pull it off.

Some might question why anyone would need that kind of graphics muscle in a mobile device, but Steve Steele, ARM Senior Product Manager, says you can never ever have enough processing power. Steve points out, “Those clever artistic folks who create content will always find exciting new ways to use up the fill-rate, triangle-rate and GFLOPS that you have so faithfully provided in the latest technology. This is, of course, great because it means that consumer products are constantly improving to provide more and more exciting user-experiences.”

For an idea of the kinds of user experiences that might be created for this next-generation GPU, check out the new video ARM uploaded for the Mali-T658. It might not be the most exciting looking video, but you can see that augmented reality apps will play a big role.

Other than games, what kinds of experiences would you like to see created for a 10x faster GPU?

Curious about which processor will be used in the Samsung Galaxy S III? Rumors have suggested that Samsung was working on a quad-core 2.0 GHz processor. That sounds crazy, but there is a small chance it might actually come true.

Samsung already announced their upcoming dual-core 1.5 GHz Exynos 4212. This system-on-a-chip appears [...]]]>

Curious about which processor will be used in the Samsung Galaxy S III? Rumors have suggested that Samsung was working on a quad-core 2.0 GHz processor. That sounds crazy, but there is a small chance it might actually come true.

Samsung already announced their upcoming dual-core 1.5 GHz Exynos 4212. This system-on-a-chip appears to be similar in design to the 1.2 GHz Exynos 4210 found in several Galaxy S II phones. But it is now built with Samsung’s advanced 32nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) low-power process, which promises “30 percent lower power-level over the previous process generation.” It looks like the smaller process technology allowed Samsung to crank up the speed of the GPU too, because they are promising “50 percent higher 3D graphics performance over the previous processor generation from Samsung.”

I’m sure many of you would love a phone that operates at 30 percent lower power while delivering 50 percent higher 3D graphics performance, but is that a big enough jump for the Samsung Galaxy S III? If Samsung holds off on releasing the SGSIII till the second-half of 2012 there might be another option.

At this week’s ARM TechCon 2001 John Kalkman, VP LSI, Samsung Electronics said, “I’m extremely excited to announce that Samsung will deliver a new Exynos processor in 2012 that leverages both the Cortex-A7 and big.Little technology to meet the crucial demands of always-on and always-connected computing.”

I don’t want to dive into all the technical details of big.Little processing again, but the basic concept is that you combine high performance cores along side low-power cores in order to achieve the best possible combination of performance and battery life.

And when it comes to battery life, the early numbers are looking good. ARM is promising big.Little processing can extend battery life by up to 70%.

A sample big.Little implementation of Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15.

The most likely setup that Samsung would go with would be two high-performance Cortex-A15 cores around 1.8-2.0 GHz and two low-power Cortex-A7 cores at 1.2 GHz. Based on the proposed release schedule, this would be built on a 28nm process technology.

That scenario might sound like a stretch, but we were already expecting the first Cortex-A15 processors like the OMAP5 around the second-half of 2012. Qualcomm will also release the first mobile processor at 28nm (Snapdragon S4) during the first-half of 2012, and we expect most of the high-end processors to migrate to 28nm by the end of next year.

I would be pretty amazed that Samsung could pull this off so fast, but they have been working closely with ARM for many years. Several eyebrows were raised when Samsung dumped Imagination Technologies’ Power VR GPU for the ARM Mali-400, but I heard rumors at Mobile World Congress that this move was in exchange for a future favor. It’s possible that Samsung collaborated on the Cortex-A7 design and that’s why they get first access to it.

We probably won’t know till next year’s Mobile World Congress which version of Exynos will be found in the SGSIII, but it’s always fun to speculate on future technology that makes your new phone feel old. If I were Samsung, I’d put all my R&D resources toward rolling out this next-gen Exynos as soon as possible and put it in the SGSIII, even if that means pushing back the release several months.

How do you measure success in the mobile application processor business? NVIDIA recently revealed that their Tegra 2 processor accounts for 70% of the non-iPad tablet market, but it cost them $2 billion dollars to get there and Android tablets haven’t been exactly flying off the shelves yet (until recently).

Company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang [...]]]>

How do you measure success in the mobile application processor business? NVIDIA recently revealed that their Tegra 2 processor accounts for 70% of the non-iPad tablet market, but it cost them $2 billion dollars to get there and Android tablets haven’t been exactly flying off the shelves yet (until recently).

Company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has previously said that if you want to build and sustain a world-class SoC (system-on-a-chip) business, then you need that business generating up to $1 billion in revenue to remain competitive. Analysts are expecting Tegra revenue to come in between $400-600 million this year, so sales would need to double in 2012 to reach that goal.

Most of us with Honeycomb tablets will agree that the Tegra 2 is a fine processor, but most of the 400 plus design wins that NVIDIA racked up were thanks to its advantage of being the lead platform for Android 3.0. Texas Instruments will enjoy that luxury as we migrate to Android 4.0 devices and the mobile SoC business is heating up with Intel expected to join the party, so competition will be fiercer than ever in 2012.

Can NVIDIA actually double their Tegra business and record $1 billion in revenue next year? This time last year Tegra had about 0% market share, so it would be a big achievement for them to pull it off. As we gear up for the Tegra 3 launch, it certainly looks like their strategy could pay off big time.

Quad-core ultra performance comes to Android

History has shown us that most new mobile processors only enjoy around 3-6 months as the new kids on the block before a competitor comes out with a slightly faster product and woos away the early adopters. However, when you bring to market the first mobile quad-core processor months ahead of the compeition, then you will attract a lot of high-end buyers during the important Holiday shopping season.

Just as Amazon has taken over the bargain-price tablet market with their Kindle Fire at $199, I expect ASUS will corner the market on high-end tablets with their quad-core Transformer Prime. We expect that device to go on sale next month, and I don’t see any other tablets on the horizon that will be able to compete this year.

comScore report bodes well for Tegra Zone

When it comes to differentiating their mobile platform and promoting their unique user experiences, NVIDIA has invested heavily in Tegra Zone to bring more premium games to Android devices. So far that has resulted in 22 games, a full-blown community site, and over 1 million installs of theTegra Zone app.

A recent report by comScore shows that two thirds of tablet owners play games on their device, so expect NVIDIA to keep pushing this strategy even more as their Tegra business grows.

ARM’s new Cortex-A7 big.Little processing concept validates NVIDIA’s “companion core” strategy

We have known about NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 processor (aka Project Kal-El) since early this year, but we were recently surprised to learn that it includes a stealth 5th “companion core” that promises to extend battery life.

This strategy of including an extra low-power core that runs at slower speeds has been debated by competitors. Qualcomm uses their own asynchronous symmetric multiprocessing (aSMP) technology and said it eliminates the need for ‘companion’ or ‘little’ cores since each core in an aSMP system can be operated in low power mode due to the independent voltage and frequency control per core.

On the other hand we just saw ARM announce a similar concept called big.Little processing which pairs a lower-power Cortex-A7 processor alongside a faster Cortex-A15 processor. ARM said this type of implementation could extend battery life by up to 70%, so it will be interesting to see how NVIDIA and Qualcomm’s solutions measure up.

So far it sounds like ARM is impressed by what NVIDIA has done with Tegra 3. Dylan McGrath of EETimes just posted an interview with Peter Greenhalgh, an ARM engineer who served as the lead designer on the A7, and he said, “”We find it very interesting to see what Nvidia has done. It’s fantastic, and it validates big-little.”

The ability to surprise is key

NVIDIA certainly surprised the industry with their “companion core” and they will need to keep pushing innovation to catch up to the large incumbents like Qualcomm and Samsung. At last week’s AsiaD conference, NVIDIA also revealed that Tegra 3 will include a special image-processing technique that “radically simplifies the way color is displayed , saving ‘tons of power’ without reducing the visual experience.”

We still don’t know how much Tegra 3 can extend battery life compared to the current generation of mobile processors, but NVIDIA says their 5th “companion core” uses 20 times less power than the four main cores. If this super low power mode works as described, we should see devices with industry leading standby time and battery life.

Larger competitors like Intel are already touting their advantage in process technology and the race to smaller transistors, so it will be key that NVIDIA can “surprise and delight” its customers with “magical” products.

Cars, TVs, and baseband processors

Tegra has dominated Android tablets, but there are some new areas where it should gain market share in 2012. Next year we expect to see Tegra gain share in smart TVs, cars, and baseband processors.

Not many details have leaked out about the Google TV 2.0 refresh, but Tegra 3 looks poised to play a role in some those products. It’s capable of decoding 1440p video, which would look awesome on the next-gen of HDTVs. Intel is winding down their Digital Home Group that was responsible for the processor in the first-gen of Google TV devices, so that opens the door for the ARM architecture to take over future products.

We have already seen Tegra inside several cars in years past and that will continue to grow next year. All Audis will be powered by Tegra in 2012 and others have reported we will ”see a lot of cars with NVIDIA” early next year. Google has at least 50 people working on self-driving cars, so we should see more advanced mobile application processors coming to the road over the coming years.

Finally, another opportunity for huge growth is NVIDIA’s new baseband processor business, which they gained by acquiring Icera for $367 million this year. Outside of the application processor, the baseband processor is the next most important chip in most connected devices and NVIDIA thinks they have something special in Icera.

Expected to appear in both smartphones and tablets early next year, the Icera soft modem offers full Multimode LTE support. When paired with a Tegra 3 application processor, NVIDIA would now control the two most important chips inside a mobile device. They also plan to build a unified Tegra chip with an integrated modem called Grey, which will allow them to compete with Qualcomm’s fully integrated Snapdragon platform in the low-end part of the smartphone market.

It all comes down to product timing

When asked about Tegra’s outlook for the rest of this year during last quarter’s earnings call, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang responded that a lot of it came down time timing and well-positioned product launches.

And so the only thing that I can watch is how many design wins do we have? And are they high-quality design wins from high-quality customers and OEMs? And when the phones and the devices come out, are they well-positioned? Are they really well-designed? And are they well-positioned as a product?Jen-Hsun HuangNVIDIA CEO

A quick glance at Texas Instruments and their OMAP4 timing confirms most of this theory. In the span of a couple of weeks, we saw all the big holiday product launches (including the Droid Bionic, Droid RAZR, Galaxy Nexus, and Kindle Fire) go with a Texas Instruments processor, which will easily generate hundreds of millions in revenue.

It will take multiple well-positioned product launches for Tegra 3 to match those numbers, so we will have to wait and see which designs they win. ASUS will be first to market with a Tegra 3 tablet, but I expect many more existing Tegra 2 customers will return to launch new products built around Tegra 3. Tablets will get all the attention at first, but there will likely be more Tegra 3 chips inside smartphones (that currently account for 2/3 of all Tegra sales).

In closing it looks like Tegra still has the potential to become a multi-billion dollar business, but there are so many factors involved that it’s hard to predict when it will happen. NVIDIA is already working on the next three generations of Tegra at the same time, so they remain confident in the growth of mobile. Any delay of the next Tegra release cycle would be very costly, but NVIDIA still has around $2.5 billion in cash and Tegra is a long-term investment they are going to keep spending on.

Don’t expect NVIDIA to maintain their dominance in non-iPad tablets, but the rising tide of Android (and possibly Windows 8) will take Tegra to new heights in 2012.

What will become the best mobile processor next year? After NVIDIA and Qualcomm just briefed us on their next-generation offerings, Texas Instruments felt the need to remind us that OMAP5 is coming in the second half of next year. Not many details have changed since we first learned about OMAP5 back in [...]]]>

What will become the best mobile processor next year? After NVIDIA and Qualcomm just briefed us on their next-generation offerings, Texas Instruments felt the need to remind us that OMAP5 is coming in the second half of next year. Not many details have changed since we first learned about OMAP5 back in February, but the team at TI emailed us to share a new series of videos that show the processor in action.

Texas Instruments is hoping to offer the first mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC) to include ARM’s latest Cortex-A15 core that was announced last year. The new CPU core and new multi-core PowerVR SGX544MP should deliver 3x the performance and 5x the graphics of the current generation OMAP4.

When it comes to availability, the OMAP5 is “expected to sample in the second-half of 2011, with devices on the market in the second half of 2012.” Depending when devices based on OMAP5 actually arrive, they should be competing with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon S4 or NVIDIA’s Kal-El+ refresh part.

It’s way too early to pick a winner at this stage, but Texas Instruments should receive a nice bump in design wins thanks to becoming the lead platform for Ice Cream Sandwich.

In the mean time, we are still waiting on the first Android device that features the dual-core 1.5 GHz OMAP4460, which appears to have been delayed. TI will also have the faster 1.8 GHz OMAP4470 available in the first-half of next year to hold us over till OMAP5.

Which mobile processor do you think will wear the performance crown this time next year?

Learn more about extraordinary experiences delivered by OMAP technology:

• Watch this video to see the OMAP 5 platform’s graphics capabilities in action
• Check out this short demo series to see how OMAP technology enables experiences better than anyone else
• Visit the OMAP 5 platform page and experience page for product details