Will Amazon buy OMAP?

Texas Instruments (TI) recently announced they were 'defocusing' efforts on their OMAP line of ARM based CPUs (OMAP is their bleeding edge line of ARM based CPUs made for mobile type devices, they also have various lines of industrial ARM based CPUs, but these tend to be based on older ARM architectures). The defocusing has led to rumours that TI want to sell their OMAP devision. Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble use OMAP processors for their Kindle and Nook readers respectively. It seems Amazon has been in discussions with TI for a while and they may be a leading contender in an OMAP purchase. This would give Amazon control of their own CPUs, much like Apple has done with its Ax range of CPUs. Amazon could also use the OMAP processor in devices that may come to market such as a smartphone or other tablet. Amazon may also be in discussions with RIM to license Blackberry OS 10 and also in discussion with HP to buy or license WebOS (which HP took control of when they purchased Palm). Currently WebOS is being open sourced. Amazon have already forked Google's Android and removed all the Google sign-in functionality as well as Google's apps and they run their own Amazon app store.

NVidia introduces Tegra3

NVidia has starting showing off it's new Tegra3 ARM based system (code named Kal-El). It has 4 cores based on the Cortex-A9 architecture and a 12 core GForce graphics GPU which allows for hardware accelerated affects such as dynamic lighting, Flash Player 11, HTML5 and WebGL.

It can also output to HDMI and support NVidia's 3D Vision technology which converts OpenGL to stereo 3D for viewing on a 3D TV.

However the main advancement is that it offers 3 times the graphics performance while offering a 61% lower power consumption than the Tegra2. It achieves some of this by actually having 5 CPU cores (the 5th being a low power ARM variant) and only using the Cortex-A9 cores for intensive CPU applications, so when a system is just playing music or some other non-CPU intensive task the big cores are powered down. This is known as variable symmetric multiprocessing (vSMP) and is a technology patented by NVidia.

The Tegra3 will be used in a forthcoming tablet from ASUS known as the Asus EE Pad Transformer Prime.

Other ARM licensees such as Texas Instruments (TI) are already snapping at NVidia's heals with forthcoming high performance OMAP chips which will support technologies such as holographic displays, HD augmented reality, real time voice translation and natural speech interaction.

There are now more ARM processors than actual arms in the world now.