
Texas Instruments Cuts 1,700 Jobs and Winds Down Tablet Chips - luu
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/11/14/business/14reuters-texasinstruments-jobcuts.html
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revelation
They are not shutting it down, they are refocusing on embedded. If you
remember, that is the market the OMAP processors started in long ago.

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slacka
According the the article, TI is "eliminating 1,700 jobs in their mobile
processor business unit" and will "stop developing new chips." You call it
refocusing, I call it to terminate with extreme prejudice. Either way, it's
the end of the line for OMAP CPUs.

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vonmoltke
OMAP is not just mobile processors. "...TI wants to sell its OMAP processors
in markets that require less investment, like industrial clients like
carmakers." So no, they are not shutting down OMAP, they are shutting down the
OMAP lines that feed consumer electronics.

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edderly
Their future hardware IP design work is effective(ly) dead. Embedded on OMAP
has always been a derivative of the R&D invested for the mobile market. You
can also look at the Sitara products which are respins of OMAP IPs with a few
needs for embedded.

~~~
dfox
that makes sense, because almost no application of OMAP really used all it's
features (notably embedded DSP core), only significant consumer/mobile
application I can think of are Nokia's phones based on Symbian EKA2, which are
effectively dead now (and OMAP combined with EKA2 was significant competitive
advantage for Nokia when they wasn't, as that enabled them to replace their
ARM-based custom SoC with OMAP and build smartphones essentially derived from
feature phone hardware without dedicated baseband CPU). Before that (early
00's) there wasn't any other real SoC solution, as most other mobile
processors required some external (mobile-specific: touch screen, power
management...) support circuitry and OMAP previosly filled this niche, now it
seems that there isn't any real makret for OMAP SoC's as nobody is interested
in building anything that leverages OMAP architecture, because random mobile
SoCs paired with some generic baseband are cheaper and consumers does not seem
to care about battery life.

It does not make sense to develop hardware which nobody really uses and try to
be price competitive with cheaper designs that are adequate for most
customers.

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ansible
_that makes sense, because almost no application of OMAP really used all it's
features..._

I'm not sure why you say that. All accelerated video encoding/decoding is done
on the DSP. This is in contrast to the Freescale i.MX5 series, for example,
which has dedicated hardware blocks for this.

~~~
YZF
The OMAP4 has dedicated video encode decode, dedicated "still image"
processor, _and_ a general purpose DSP (which isn't used for the most part and
would be a lot slower than the dedicated hardware units).

EDIT: The thing though is that its footprint is so small that it doesn't
matter much.

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StringyBob
Rumor mill [1] claims TI's trying to make the division more attractive to sell
off to Amazon - so they can make their own chips to compete with Apple.

[1] <http://deepchip.com/items/0514-03.html>

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wmf
Why would Amazon buy a division that has no employees?

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yason
Wow. That falls directly to NVIDIA and Qualcomm and... are there any other
major players anymore, actually?

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brigade
Samsung. Exynos 5 is powering the Chromebook and Nexus 10 after all. Allwinner
is popular among the low end Chinese stuff, so there's always the chance that
they'll expand into higher end SoCs.

AFAIK Freescale is taking the same path as TI, canceling i.MX7 and exiting
application SoCs. ST-Ericsson has a nice A15/Rogue SoC in development, but it
remains to be seen if it'll be popular among smartphones/tablets.

~~~
joezydeco
Do you have any hard news links discussing Freescale's roadmap? I'm about to
commit a design to i.MX6 and if that's the end of the road, that's useful
news.

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strendal
Garmin uses lot of OMAP chipsets

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kqr2
Does anyone know if this affects TI's Davinci line?

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dschleef
Not directly. Davinci is a different business unit than OMAP.

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dschiptsov
Reminds me a story of IBM's PC division..)

