OMAP

OMAP (Open Multimedia Applications Platform) is a family of image/video processors that was developed by Texas Instruments.

OMAP devices generally include a general-purpose ARM architecture processor core plus one or more specialized co-processors.

OMAP enjoyed some success in the smartphone and tablet market until 2011 when it lost ground to Qualcomm Snapdragon.

[2] On September 26, 2012, Texas Instruments announced that they would wind down their operations in smartphone and tablet oriented chips and focus on embedded platforms instead.

[3] On November 14, 2012, Texas Instruments announced they would cut 1,700 jobs due to their shift from mobile to embedded platforms.

These are parts originally intended for use as application processors in smartphones, with processors powerful enough to run significant operating systems (such as Linux, FreeBSD, Android or Symbian), support connectivity to personal computers, and support various audio and video applications.

It included many variants, most easily distinguished according to manufacturing technology (130 nm except for the OMAP171x series), CPU, peripheral set, and distribution channel (direct to large handset vendors, or through catalog-based distributors).

Products using OMAP 1 processors include hundreds of cell phone models, and the Nokia 770 Internet tablets.

The video technology in the higher end OMAP 3 parts is derived in part from the DaVinci product line, which first packaged higher end C64x+ DSPs and image processing controllers with ARM9 processors last seen in the older OMAP 1 generation or ARM Cortex-A8.

All OMAP 4 processors come with an IVA3 multimedia hardware accelerator with a programmable DSP that enables 1080p Full HD and multi-standard video encoding and decoding.

[32] The 5th generation OMAP, OMAP 5 SoC uses a dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU with two additional Cortex-M4 cores to offload the A15s in less computationally intensive tasks to increase power efficiency, two PowerVR SGX544MP graphics cores and a dedicated TI 2D BitBlt graphics accelerator, a multi-pipe display sub-system and a signal processor.

Other devices that use OMAP processors include Sony Ericsson's Satio (Idou) and Vivaz, most Samsung phones running Symbian (including Omnia HD), the Nook Color, some Archos tablets (such as Archos 80 gen 9 and Archos 101 gen 9), Kindle Fire HD, Blackberry Playbook, Kobo Arc, and B&N Nook HD.