Texas Instruments Flexes Its Muscles: OMAP 5 Trounces Apple’s A5X

U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing company Texas Instruments has just presented its new OMAP 5430 processor. The new mobile wonder is built in the advanced 28 nm manufacturing technology and features four computing cores.

Many might believe that the four cores are ARM Cortex A9, but that’s not the case with the new OMAP 5430 processor.

TI’s new architecture is, of course, ARM-based, but two of the cores are using the Cortex A15 architecture, while the other two are low-power Cortex M4 cores.

Some might say that this “differential core” approach is similar to what Nvidia did with its own penta-core Tegra 3 mobile CPU that features four Cortex A9 cores and a fifth “companion” core.

In TI’s new OMAP 5430 processor, the two Cortex M4 cores will handle digital signal control and many simple tasks, while the A15 cores will power up only when demanding applications are started.

ARM’s Cortex A15 architecture is a modern wonder, as it provides close to 100% performance improvement over the previous Cortex A9 design without requiring highly-threaded applications to show its performance.

The Cortex A15 architecture is simply twice as fast in single-threaded applications when compared with Cortex A9 cores.

The addition of Cortex  M4 cores for low-power use seems to have helped Texas Instruments achieve satisfactory battery life with the OMAP 5340, so the company decided to use higher clocks on the integrated GPU.

Next to the two Cortex A15 and the two Cortex M4 cores, the OMAP 5430 has PowerVR’s SGX544MP2 graphics.

When compared with Apple’s A5X, the OMAP 5430 doesn’t seem too powerful on the 3D side, as the SGX543MP4 inside Apple’s CPU is considerably more powerful that the SGX544MP2.

The only way that Texas Instruments could achieve better performance is by using higher frequencies on its SGX544MP2 and benefiting from the high-performance Cortex A15 architecture.

As you can see from the benchmarks, the OMAP 5430 practically trounces Apples iPad3 called “Market-leading tablet” in TI’s benchmarks.