Texas Instruments hasn’t had many chips on the Android devices launched this year, so it was bound to come with something to surpass the offers of rivals Qualcomm Snapdragon and Nvidia Tegra 2. TI just announced a new OMAP ARM CPU, the OMAP4470. This is a dual core 1.8GHz processor that will launch in the first half of 2012.
Since the new CPU was announced now, it might take a while till we see it on products and by then quad core chipsets might take over. The new CPU has twice the power of Tegra 2 and also a nifty addition: two ARM9 cores, plus two smaller ARM M3 cores to ease the load on the first two. This makes it perfect for tasks such as rendering 3D graphics, for example.
The smaller cores will draw less power, according to TI and they’ll also optimize battery life. Still, this is “almost quad core” and it’s coming to town in 2012, so we can’t wait.
