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Heterogeneous Reconfigurable Processors Are Here

Texas Instruments announced the OMAP 5 platform processor, the fifth generation in its OMAP application processors for mobile multimedia applications. OMAP stands for Open Multimedia Application Platform and comprises a series of processors that integrate (at least) one general-purpose ARM core and one ore more specialised co-processors to offer high performance in particular for multimedia applications with a minimal energy consumption signature.

With its fifth generaion, Texas Instruments introduces a highly heterogeneous and self-adaptive architecture which incorporates 2 Cortex-A15 cores, and 2 ARM Cortex-M4 processors for offloading real-time processing to improve responsiveness. In addition, the processor sports engines for video, imaging, DSP, 3d & 2d graphics, display and security. Texas Instruments claims that the OMAP 5 will offer up to three times the processing performance of the OMAP4 at only 40 percent of the power consumption. It is capable of processing speed up to 2 GHz per core, combined with up to 8 GB dynamic memory access.
Most interesting in the context of S(o)OS is thereby the strong heterogeneity of the system, as well as a special power consumption feature: the OMAP5 can dynamically switch between the high performance and the low power cores, depending on usage. The processor will thus dynamically shift the processes according to their performance profile. The OMAP5 thereby handles all process switching and distribution on a hardware level - it is unclear as yet, how much influence the user / developer can take over this distribution in order to develop applications that explicitly use the co-processors or switching features, e.g. to use all 4 cores at the same time etc.