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Handhelds Hardware

TI Lands OMAP in a Pocket PC. 75

Posted by timothy from the intel-is-not-the-only-option dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "TI has officially invaded Intel's territory, having landed its OMAP chip in HP's Jornada 928. TI also landed a SmartPhone reference design agreement with Microsoft, but so did Intel. See the article, and a picture of the unit at Forbes.com."
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TI Lands OMAP in a Pocket PC. More

TI Lands OMAP in a Pocket PC.

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  • Doesn't TI know they're supposed to rename any chip for portable/handheld use so that it's an Anime reference?

    *cough* Dragonball *cough*

  • The article wasn't clear (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Does this mean that the Jornada in question isn't a Pocket PC 2002 device any more?

  • Umm two standards from Microsoft with one thing in common.....

    Microsoft

    Well what a suprise, in some ways this must be a massive boon to the people associated with Symbian as it means Microsoft has a fragmented strategy and is pissing off its partners. Could this be the beasts strategy for this market, lots of deals with lots of people so it doesn't progress anywhere ? Wait till Moore's law allows WindowsXP to run on Mobiles, probably 5 years by my calculations.

  • Don't mess with Texas (Instruments)!

  • Who said this: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @03:13PM (#3033359) Homepage Journal
    "If you combine a cell phone with a PDA, you're either going to get a PDA that's a crappy cellphone or a cellphone that's a crappy PDA"

    As cool as this looks, I don't think the above has been invalidated yet. I'll STILL point to the example that came up with Qualcomm's PDA/Cellphone: What happens when you want to talk to comeone and LOOK AT YOUR PDA at the same time? (Nah, I don't carry the hands free earbud everywhere I go...it's got a CABLE...it gets TANGLED.)


    • Its a better phone (if a little big) because of the PDA functions, and the PDA is superb.

      And its actually available in the US as the 9290. Nokia are very smooth [nokiausa.com] also can be used as a terminal emulator to plug into a switch or firewall via the RS232 cable it comes with.

      And as for the talking thing.... the Nokia has a full and very good speaker phone, so its open on my desk right now. You can do everything while on a call.
      • You're not from here are ya? )/me looks at email address.) See, you're from _over_there_. You've had better phone stuff your YEARS! :P
    • I don't remember who said that, but I remember the article. The problem stems from having opposing customer requirements.

      People want cell phones to be small and unobtrusive.

      People want PDA displays and interfaces as big as possible and still be portable and convenient.

      It's a 'have your cake and eat it, too' problem.

    • What happens when I want to use the PDA and I'm on the phone? I tap the "speakerphone" button for a moment and carry on talking while I look something up.

      It's a lot more convient than what happens when I'm on the phone and don't -have- a PDA with me.
  • Wow. Some competition. Guess we'll soon start seeing Microsoft TI-89 calculators coming out.

  • TI-85 (Score:3, Funny)

    by aardwolf64 ( 160070 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @03:14PM (#3033375) Homepage
    Well... I guess with TI's calculator background we don't have to worry about any floating point errors...*grin*

  • ARM (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Lewisham ( 239493 )
    The ones to watch out for are ARM [arm.com]. They have a tendency to sneak their way into practically everything: cars, mobile phones, PSIONs, even your Gameboy Advance.

    They have their sticky thumbs in a lot of different pies and because of the practical collapse of PSION handhelds, are probably itching to get back into the palmtop market.

    Oh, they're also in your iPod too, and quite possibly your car :)
    • "Get back into the palmtop market"??? They've never left: the iPaq and a dozen other PocketPC devices are already StrongARM based.
      • Really? Their web site doesn't make that fact very apparent :)
        They seem far more interested in cars. That gets another menu layer :)

    • Re:ARM (Score:1)

      by pecka ( 31619 )
      hmm, and i thought that intel owns all ARM's patents. So ARM = intel infact.

      • Re:ARM (Score:2)

        by jonr ( 1130 )
        No. Intel licences the ARM core from ARM Ltd. AFAIK, ARM is still an independent company.

      • Re:ARM (Score:1)

        by pslam ( 97660 )
        hmm, and i thought that intel owns all ARM's patents. So ARM = intel infact.

        The StrongARM was actually designed by Digital, not Intel. Intel bought up StrongARM along with Digital, but they didn't get the core patents with it. ARM is making quite a mint out of licensing their cores.

        TI has been one of ARM's rivals in the DSP business. I suppose this means TI has given up, now. The fun thing about ARM cores is they're pretty much as powerful as DSPs at an equivalent cost, even though they implement an easy to program architecture. I guess the DSP manufacturers are learning the hard way about how important ease of development is these days.

        • I suppose this means TI has given up, now.
          Not at all. OMAP is an ARM chip and a TI DSP.

          TI recognises that ARM does a much better job as a GPP (General Purpose Processor) than any DSP, and also that its customers want ARM. Bundling the two means that there is less memory and power required to run the devices. There's a good reason so many companies are now going with TI for their ARM needs (Palm, most cell phone manufacturers, now HP, etc) - they're good at making small chips which use less power than the competition do more.

          Another poster [slashdot.org] described the various offerings made by different companies in the ARM business. The thing which is different about OMAP and XScale, among others, is not that they have "DSP Features," but that they have a complete DSP on-chip. (Maybe even on-die; I'm not positive.) A similar technology is behind many cellular phones, such as the recent ones Nokia produces. The ARM runs the OS, and the DSP handles all the cell phone signal handling, as it was designed to do.

          Disclaimer: I also work for TI, with Mechanik [slashdot.org].
          Double-disclaimer: We don't work in hardware.

          • Re:ARM (Score:1)

            by pslam ( 97660 )
            TI recognises that ARM does a much better job as a GPP (General Purpose Processor) than any DSP, and also that its customers want ARM. Bundling the two means that there is less memory and power required to run the devices.

            Well, bundling just one core which is efficient at both (not unreasonable) would be more efficient on memory and power. Being good at DSP doesn't mean you can't be good at being a GPP (and vice versa). Most DSPs are bad at being GPPs because they have weird word sizes (like 24 bit) or weird memory architecture (program/X/Y RAM, no byte access), or blatant limitations (fixed size hardware stacks).

            I suspect the reason for going with ARM is to do with development effort. There's already tons of software written for ARM processors. And if you run Linux (or Windows CE) on it, you've got support for pretty much every device you can think of out-of-the-box. And all that code you wrote one day for a PC or other similar architecture in C will "just work" on it too. I guess there must also be a ton of software already written for existing TI DSPs - and that can all get reused.

            The thing which is different about OMAP and XScale, among others, is not that they have "DSP Features," but that they have a complete DSP on-chip

            From what I've read the XScale doesn't have a "DSP" as such on-chip. It implements ARM9 style 2x16bit SIMD operations, but they also bolted on a separate multiply-accumulate unit which can run concurrently to everything else. However, execution is issued from the same pipeline as everything else so it's not exactly concurrent and it's also (strangely) not single cycle. As far as I can tell it's only just faster than doing MACs without it. Perhaps I'm missing something :)

    • They have a tendency to sneak their way into practically everything: cars, mobile phones, PSIONs, even your Gameboy Advance.

      And this is a problem?

      The ARM architecture has consistantly shown to be a cheap and easy to use processor with low power requirements, and a complete set of integrated components. Whats more, the ARM chips are fully supported under both Linux and Pocket PC.

      It is not by chance that most of the PDAs being readied for production this year are StrongArm based (see here [linuxdevices.com]
      for a list of those PDAs that support Linux).

      I'm not one to support a monopoly for the sake of having a monopoly, but if a company manages to crawl to the top based on superior products, I can only say one thing: w00t.

    • Re:ARM (Score:2)

      by GoRK ( 10018 )
      Maybe you should actually *read* the ARM website you link to.

      OMAP is an ARM core with extra DSP functions. TI makes it.

      StrongARM is an ARM core with lots of flexibility (ie reconfigurable pins). Intel makes it.

      XScale is an ARM core with some neat extra extensions and very high clockspeed. Intel makes it.

      NETsilicon makes a neat little ARM7TDMI core processor with an ethernet controller in it. Nearly a full system on chip.

      Other companies produce various ARM cores. Almost everyone and their dog makes ARM core chips. A project got shut down recently on Opencores that had an open design ARM core chip that you could make in your garage fab (shea)! It is very difficult to find someone NOT developing a handheld today on top of any other processor. All the PocketPC devices are ARM core. New PalmOS devices are (imminently) ARM. This handheld is ARM. Gameboy Advance is ARM. I have two telephones on my desk that have StrongARM's in them. (Another admittedly has a PPC core)

      Get back into the palmtop market? You must be smoking crack.

      ~GoRK
        • Maybe you should actually *read* the ARM website you link to.

          OMAP is an ARM core with extra DSP functions.

        OMAP is a single chip with BOTH an ARM core and a TI 55x DSP core (and a bunch of peripherals too).
    • Both of the chips mentioned (Intel's XScale and TI's OMAP) are built on the ARM core.

      Go ARM!

  • Where does linux fit in to all this? I know of a few projets to port linux to the ARM platform, but what about the IT one? What *nix based/IT based handhelds are out there, or are being worked on?
    • Where does linux fit in to all this?

      Let the karma whoring commence! :-)

      They already have Linux running on these, on both the ARM and the C55x DSP cores that comprise the OMAP chip. They even share the same process space, so you can initiate/control/kill processes on the DSP from the ARM. This is being done by a third party company called RidgeRun [ridgerun.com] Unfortunately, the OMAP version is not quite out yet it seems, but they have versions out for ARM + C54x DSP.

      Read this PDF [ti.com] for more technical info.

      Compilers are gcc in the case of the ARM, and the TI proprietary compiler for the DSP (ported to Linux). Debugger in both cases is GDB.

      Mechanik

      Disclaimer: I am a TI employee.

  • Good Thing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by D_Fresh ( 90926 ) <slashdot AT dougalexander DOT com> on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @03:26PM (#3033478) Journal
    Anything that challenges Intel's processor hegemony in emergent platform markets is fine with me. Not because I hate Intel, but because tying the future of any industry's hardware to a single vendor is just asking for trouble. Monopoly or not, excessive dependence on a single architecture smacks of too many eggs in one basket, which ends up giving the suppliers greater control than the customers over the capabilities and cost of the units. Any biologist can tell you that host diversity goes a long way toward stopping epidemics that threaten to wipe out the whole species.

    Perhaps the fabrication of these PDA chips will be a good toehold for the next Intel of the chip industry, since it's too hard to break into the current desktop market [slashdot.org] with the complexity of those chips.

  • Other OMAP-related products:

    MICROSOFT AND TEXAS INSTRUMENTS INTRODUCE WINDOWS-POWERED SMARTPHONE 2002 AND OMAP(TM) REFERENCE DESIGN

    New 2.5G Reference Design Combines Strengths of Smartphone 2002 Software and TI's OMAP Processors to Enable Rich Voice and Data-Capable Phones in Small, Sleek Form Factor

    You can read the full article at http://focus.ti.com/docs/pr/pressrelease.jhtml?pre lId=sc02025 [ti.com].

    I also suspect that many other products will begin to appear similar to this new Jornada and SmartPhone. You can probably sign-up to be notified on ti.com (Texas Instruments' website).

    EricKrout.com :: A Weblog On Crack (updated daily) [erickrout.com]


    • So that means its got a life expectancy of around 12 months everywhere else but the US. Add in time to manufacture and get running and this really is a bizarre agreement. Its like signing an agreement for 56k modems as everyone else moves to DSL.

  • pictures... (Score:2, Informative)

    by zome ( 546331 )
    For those who are not so lucky to get there quick enough, go here [pdabuzz.com] to see pics and screenshots.

    If I have to choose between HP and Treo, I would prefer Treo. It's smaller and I want a phone that can be PDA. This HP is PDA that has phone feature. but for someone who paln to do a lot of wireless web browser, HP beats treo to the ground.
  • From the "features and benefits of OMAP" PDF document, OMAP (an ARM based processor with DSP functionality) has good OS/language support:

    "Supports leading mobile operating systems such as Windows CE, Symbian OS, Palm OS and Linux."

    also

    "Use high-level programming languages such as C/C++, Java etc."

    Mmmmm, another nice mobile Java platform. =)

    299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

  • infoSync has a better picture (Score:4, Informative)

    by Raetsel ( 34442 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @04:01PM (#3033722)

    infoSync's article [infosync.no] has a much better picture of the Jornada 928 [infosync.no] than the token thumbnail Forbes provides.

    They also have an article about what has been added to WinCE [infosync.no] (guess I know why MS calls it PocketPC now...) to turn it into a mobile phone-integrated PDA. There are six (!) pages of screen shots in that one. You can also look forward to "...Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002 Enterprise Edition, which adds Server ActiveSync..." -- here's ANOTHER pie MS wants to sell you pieces of.

    The interesting thing is that ringtones -- which phone companies want to charge you for -- aren't there. Instead, you can assign .WAV files as ring tones, and specific files for specific callers. Wonder what the motivation for that move is...?

    Still... I want one!

  • Intel's territory? (Score:3, Informative)

    by tiomapengineer ( 560105 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @04:14PM (#3033812)
    Yes, I do work for TI.

    >> TI has officially invaded Intel's territory, having landed its OMAP chip in HP's Jornada 928.

    I would hardly call the cell phone and handheld market "Intel's territory." The cell phone market already dominated by TI (60%+ market share), while Motorola has a much stronger presence in the handheld market with its Dragonball processor. In fact, TI has signed up 9 out the top 10 cell phone manufacturers to use its OMAP platform.

    • Maybe the post should have been a little clearer, but I took "Intel's territory" to mean PocketPC-based devices. Nearly every PocketPC-based device in its current incarnation uses an Intel StrongARM chip (including the current Jornada).
  • A little more interesting is that TI is working with Nokia to counter Microsoft's entry into the cell phone market. They're working on a standard that will be available to their competitors. Article here [reuters.com]. Microsoft is working with TI and Intel too [com.com] (that article is named Microsoft brings wireless to Windows, I think it should be more like Microsoft tries to toss Windows on Wireless... Who do you want to hang up on today?)

    Too bad nobody seems to be taking any open source based options for cell phones...

  • The actual winner in this market is, ofcourse ARM. And with this, the era of having a processor core/architecture as IP has arrived. With good development tools, and power and MHz, ARM has a good roadmap ahead. I wonder what happened to the competing MIPS core.

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