Texas Instruments demos first OMAP 5, Android 4.0-based reference design, promises it in laptops next year (video)

By Darren Murph posted Jan 12th 2012 9:20PM Texas Instruments promised us a new helping of OMAP right around a year ago, and sure enough, OMAP 5 processors will be sampling to partners as early as next week. Texas Instruments' Remi El-Ouazzane (VP of OMAP) just debuted an OMAP 5-based reference design (or "development platform," if you will) on our CES stage, a solid four years after OMAP 3 debuted on a nondescript Archos tablet. OMAP 5 brings along a pair of cores and plenty of power savings, a dual-GPU architecture and more raw horsepower than the average simpleton is used to handling in a single palm. We saw quite a bit of swiping through Android 4.0.1, and as you'd expect, everything looked decidedly snappy. 720p video at 30 frames per second is no real chore, with the platform capable of pushing 1080p material at 64 frames per second (130 frames per second without screen refresh limitations). Of course, with everything being hardware accelerated, we can't feign surprise about its future on netbooks and laptops. To quote Remi:

"This is the greatest platform on Earth right now... way ahead of Apple, and it's the first Cortex-A15 (which runs 2x faster than the Cortex-A9) product on the market. When running two Cortex-A15 chips at 800MHz, it's more or less the same performance as running two Cortex-A9s at 1.5GHz. You'll see [commercially available products] ramping up with this stuff in late 2012 or early 2013. We are also running Windows 8 on the latest OMAP; it runs perfectly well, and we've been working very closely with Microsoft. We're working on multiple form factors -- tablets, thin-and-lights -- and we think ARM is going to bring tablets to the masses."

He also made clear that he's hoping to bring more and more Android into the enterprise, therefore accelerating the proliferation of the OS as a whole. Moreover, he told us to "expect" OMAP 5 in laptops and Ultrabooks running Windows 8, and alluded to the possibility of seeing the first ones by CES 2013. Have a peek at the first-ever reference demo in the gallery below, and have a look at the video just past the break.
Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report.

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