TI Posts OMAP 5 Dual Core A15 vs Quad Core A9 Video
by Brian Klug on February 23, 2012 12:28 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Arm
- TI
- Cortex A9
- Cortex A15
- Mobile
- Tegra 3
- OMAP 5
It seems as though everyone is trying to preempt build excitement before MWC 2012 with their next-generation SoC related news. We've previewed Qualcomm's Krait performance on an MDP MSM8960, and now compared it to Nvidia's Tegra 3. Not to be left out of the fray, TI has just posted a video comparing a tablet running one of its OMAP 5 SoCs at 800 MHz (probably an OMAP5430) versus an unnamed quad core Cortex A9 based device. As a reminder, OMAP 5 is designed for a 28nm process and consists of two ARM Cortex A15s and two Cortex M4s alongside SGX544 MP2 graphics.
The video shows the two tablets downloading videos, playing an MP3, and running through 20 pages of EEMBC's BrowsingBench, a test we've had in our hands for a while now and will be adding to our own 2012 smartphone/tablet benchmarking suite. The unnamed quad core Cortex A9 tablet is indubitably a Transformer Prime, and the 1.3 GHz SoC itself is almost indubitably Nvidia's Tegra 3.
Both tablets appear to be using the Android 4.0 ICS stock browser to load pages, as evidenced by the action bar and buttons. The OMAP 5 tablet finishes the 20 pages in 95 seconds compared to the quad core A9's 201 seconds. We saw OMAP 5 on a development platform at CES, and clearly TI's feeling good enough about its OMAP 5 ICS port to demonstrate performance. The timing for devices with OMAP 5 inside hasn't changed, with devices expected early 2013 and possibly late 2012.
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iampedro - Thursday, February 23, 2012 - link
Tegra 3 only has one 32 bit channel which limits the processes I hope this has atleast 2 32 bit or 1 64 bit and 1 32 bit.SilentSin - Thursday, February 23, 2012 - link
Can't really tell from the abstraction in the layout diagram, but is that showing the 3G/4G radios on a separate piece of silicon and not integrated like the MSM8960?scook9 - Thursday, February 23, 2012 - link
TI has never mated mdoems and CPU on one soc. Really only qualcomm does that currently. Intel and nvidia may be doing it soon as well though.fukat - Thursday, February 23, 2012 - link
Awesome Job ... The video needs more captions/blowouts ... especially the completion time etcscook9 - Thursday, February 23, 2012 - link
While I am eager to see A15 based products hit the market and am very optimistic, this came across as marketing garbage to me..... They offered little information into their test settings. For example, what governors were used? The TI tablet is essentially and MDP and like Qualcomm most likely had the fastest governor in use. The Asus Transformer Prime (that is absolutely a prime - you can tell by the Asus skin of the android buttons - I can confirm as I am typing this on my prime....) has 3 out of the box governor settings and on boot defaults to the middle one - aka not the fastest - this does make a tangible difference in use of the tablet.My final observation is that unless proven to me, I have no way of knowing they are even running on the same wifi. Call me paranoid, but this could have been made much clearer and credible as a demo.
And of course, as others have mentioned, the A15 based stuff is going to actually get out to consumers a year later than Tegra 3, at which point I am confident that Nvidia will have an A15 based Tegra part out as well
Rits - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
This is going into the next Nexus. Something tells me that,The OMAP platform has been under-credited for a while and its TI's time to really shine. OMAP has to adopted by more manufacturers, Tegra has been lacklustre always, yet gets the headlines.
That SGX 544MP2 must beat the Adreno 320 for a start. But then again, there's samsung lurking in the corner, waiting to push the button on something mindblowing again. Its strange how Samsung manages to outdo all these expert chip makers time & again. Its been doing so for the last two generations at least and I expect no different this time around.