Texas Instruments licenses Imagination for OMAP 3

OMAP is a very popular chip and you can find it in such a mobile phones as Nokia e70, e61 and 60, various N series phones and the flagship Sony Ericsson P990 phone. A few days ago Nokia announced its flagship five mega pixel N95 phone that is set to ship in Q1 2007 and we learned that this phone also uses OMAP marchitecture but this time OMAP 2.

So far, all the OMAPs have Imagination Technologies graphics "intellectual property" inside. Imagination calls its product simply System-on-Chip Intellectual Property or for short SoCIP.

This latest announcement is just a step forward in the two companies' cooperation. Texas Instrument announced that it licensed the Power VR graphic core family and this time it is a shader programmable graphic hidden under the PowerVR SGX brand. This is the 2 D and 3D acceleration fully supporting Open GL 2.0 Shader and Microsoft vertex and pixel Shader model three. The core also performs a video and image decode and supports video formats including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, WMV, and VC-1 for single and multiple streams from SD to HDTV formats. VC-1 is what we know as HDTV quality, 480i, 720P and 1080P.

OMAP3 will find its place in many mobile phones in 2007 and TI and IT, Imagination Technologies will be there to gain the super high end mobile phones market share and a few USD or quid out of it.

Yesterday Intel announced that it wants to use Power VR SGX Shader programmable graphic as well for its mobile and desktop products, and we already predicted that such a marriage of convenience woukd happen. We wrote about it yesterday . µ