Texas Instruments product manager Brian Carlson reportedly told Fudzilla that the company plans to release a 20-nm successor to the upcoming OMAP 5 SoC that should enable true all-day computing. This new development is interesting given that previous reports indicated that Texas Instruments is actually planning to sell its OMAP division once OMAP 5 is out the door.
According to Carlson, the OMAP 5 successor is slated to arrive in 2013 and should allow the device's battery to last from the early morning hours until it's time to crawl up under the sheets for the night. The company believes this can be accomplished by making its future chips and hardware more power efficient.
But in addition to designing a more efficient SoC, the company also plans to implement "intelligent" caching and better access to memory for tablets and smartphones, as these two factors alone can help drain the battery's reserve. There's also plans to have the 20-nm chip put the host device into sleep mode more often, and to make the devices slow down / wake up faster in the process.
As reported earlier, Texas Instruments may actually sell off its OMAP division while the company is still riding high as one of the major mobile players. The rumor suggests that the company is shopping its OMAP portion to big names like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and ATIC. One suggestion is that ATIC would provide its newly-acquired OMAP division not only with cutting edge processing technology, but a huge financial backing. Global Foundries could even license OMAP-based IP to external parties like Nvidia and other licensees.
But if Texas Instruments is still planning on OMAP chips in 2013, the division sale may not even be in the works. As it stands now, we will likely not see the true full-day mobile computing scenario Carlson describes for another few years. And as Fudzilla points out, we also haven't seen any announcements on new batteries, so it appears that we'll still use the same Lithium Ion batteries and tote around our chargers for the next few years.
