Texas Instruments Debuts New DaVinci DM37x Video Processors For Future Handhelds
CPUs and GPUs get a lot of attention in the desktop and notebook worlds, but a lot fewer people give the same consideration to CPUs and GPUs in mobile devices. Texas Instruments makes this their business, though, and with tablets, navigation devices, media players and smartphones becoming so much more important these days, TI may have a much easier time getting the Average Public to pay attention. After all, who wants a sluggish smartphone or navigation system? No one.
TI is this week introducing some new silicon, namely the DaVinci DM37x video processors. Both the DM3730 and DM3725 with their ARM Cortex-A8 and C64x+ DSP core, imaging and video accelerator (IVA), 3D graphics processor (DM3730 only) and high-performance peripherals (USB 2.0, SD/MMC) integrated on a single system-on-chip (SoC), are suitable for applications requiring HD video processing or a large amount of data processing. These applications include navigation systems, media players, medical patient monitoring devices, industrial test and measurement devices, industrial vision and portable communications.
The chips themselves may never make a consumer debut, and you'll have a tough time buying these from a Best Buy. But they may start popping up in consumer handheld devices soon, offering more 3D capabilities for gaming and faster processing for things like viewing Flash sites on the go. Oh, the places we'll go.
TI is this week introducing some new silicon, namely the DaVinci DM37x video processors. Both the DM3730 and DM3725 with their ARM Cortex-A8 and C64x+ DSP core, imaging and video accelerator (IVA), 3D graphics processor (DM3730 only) and high-performance peripherals (USB 2.0, SD/MMC) integrated on a single system-on-chip (SoC), are suitable for applications requiring HD video processing or a large amount of data processing. These applications include navigation systems, media players, medical patient monitoring devices, industrial test and measurement devices, industrial vision and portable communications.
The chips themselves may never make a consumer debut, and you'll have a tough time buying these from a Best Buy. But they may start popping up in consumer handheld devices soon, offering more 3D capabilities for gaming and faster processing for things like viewing Flash sites on the go. Oh, the places we'll go.
New DaVinci™ DM37x video processors from Texas Instruments combine 1 GHz ARM® Cortex™-A8® and 800MHz C64x+™ DSP, enabling 720p HD video for media-rich applications
Hardware offers 50 percent increase in ARM performance, 40 percent increase in DSP performance, double the graphics performance with 40 percent less power consumption over OMAP3530 device
DALLAS, Aug. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Software and hardware engineers can easily design more media-rich, portable applications utilizing the new DaVinci™ DM37x video processors from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN). The DM3730 and DM3725 with their ARM® Cortex™-A8 and C64x+™ DSP core, imaging and video accelerator (IVA), 3D graphics processor (DM3730 only) and high-performance peripherals (USB 2.0, SD/MMC) integrated on a single system-on-chip (SoC), are suitable for applications requiring HD video processing or a large amount of data processing. These applications include navigation systems, media players, medical patient monitoring devices, industrial test and measurement devices, industrial vision and portable communications.
DM37x processors are software compatible with the OMAP35x generation of processors and pin-to-pin compatible with Sitara™ AM37x devices allowing for an easy product migration strategy to higher performing options. The differentiation between the DM3730 and DM3725 is that the DM3725 does not have a 3D graphics accelerator. Customers moving to the DM3730 from the OMAP3530 can look forward to a 50 percent increase in ARM performance, a 40 percent increase in DSP performance, double the graphics performance and uses approximately 40 percent less power.
The 800MHz C64x+™ DSP and hardware video accelerator enable audio and HD 720p video decoding and encoding (audio and video codecs included) independent of the ARM processor. This allows additional expansion on the ARM processor to run more high-level applications and a rich, responsive 2D or 3D graphical user interface, for applications such as an industrial personal digital assistant (PDA).
The DSP engine is programmable, allowing multiple general signal processing tasks such as digital filtering, math functions and image processing and analysis. For example, in a camera-enabled industrial application, the DSP can run an edge-detection algorithm on the video coming from a camera to detect the presence or absence of people or objects.
Minimizing development costs and accelerating time to market, TI offers a complete software development kit (SDK) containing everything developers need to evaluate the device and begin development on the DM3730 evaluation module (EVM) in minutes. To learn more, visit http://www.ti.com/dm3730-prpf.
