OMAP - The Chipset of Nokia Phones

A note today for those who wonder what kind of chipset is working in their Nokia Nseries or Internet Tablet. According to here and here, Nokia uses th Texas Instruments OMAP 2420 platform for a wide variety of their high end devices. The specs of the chipset are quite impressive. An ARM-11 CPU clocked at 330+ MHz, 2D/3G graphics booster, built in MPEG en/decoder and direct external interfaces for just about any functionality you could wish for on a mobile device. And the next generation of OMAP chipsets is just around the corner. OMAP 34xx chipsets will push beyond clock rates of 500 MHz with a processor speedup due to enhanced superscalarity of 2-3 times compared to the current generation, support cameras of up to 12 megapixels, hardware support for full DVD video quality en/decoding, etc. etc. Now translate that into next generation Nokia devices and you get a feeling for what you will have in your hands in 2 years time.

Comments

[Steve Paine]

Hi Martin.

Another important point to note is that the 3430 (Cortex A8) processor should (according to reports) match the performance of the Intel Menlow platform at 600Mhz.

It will be head-to-head with low-end Intel MIDs.

Steve.

[Steve Paine]

I might have meant '3420' in the previous post. Sorry!

[nik]

Hi Martin,

CortexA8 cores reportedly have a performance ranging from 600Mhz to nearly 1GHz depending on the process technology and libraries used. (TSMC/TII specific libraries)

But the ARM processor is handling most of the control functionality and still fails miserably compared to TI specific cores used on chip when it comes to DSP computations (DHCP/DCT stuff) .

The 2D/3D graphics processor (IP from Imagination technologies ) and an onchip Imaging, video and audio acceleration unit do most of the MPEG/H264 encoding/decoding stuff and other DSP related operations.

It is a nice heterogenous processor in a way with numerous cores handling different functionalities integrated on the same die.