TI OMAP 2 is back with a vengeance

THE HIGHLY anticipated Texas Instrument's Omap 2 chip is already shipping in Japan. The comany is working hard to ship this chip for western mobile makers and expects to ramp volumes by the end of the year.

OMAP 2 includes Power VR from Imagination Technologies and uses the quite sucessful MBX core. MBX is a great mobile core, but it is still lacking Open GL 2.0 support and programmable shaders. The company has its SGX series - about to appear in phones at some later date but MBX will do just fine.

The OMAP series is very popular and many Nokia phones including e61, E70, N91 use this chip. It is fast enough to provide some great multimedia features but the faster clocked OMAP 2 wil certainly do better. OMAP3 will bring the SGX power VR marchitecture but it is too early to talk about it. Although I just have. µ