CES 2012: Texas Instruments details its new OMAP 5 processor

Texas Instruments has been showing off the development platform for its forthcoming OMAP 5 processor at CES 2012.

The new platform was demoed on Engadget’s stage at CES 2012, and the blog has some pretty glowing things to say about what they saw demoed.

‘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,’ said Engadget.

It added: ‘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).’

Texas Instruments has big plans for its OMAP 5 processor as well - we’re talking mobile phones, tablets, netbooks and laptops.

Speaking to Engadget, Remi El-Ouazzane, VP of OMAP, said:

‘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 added.

We’re looking forward to seeing these processors, as well as the first batch of Windows 8-powered tablets and netbooks.

Roll on Q3, 2012.