The Motorola Droid X, which debuted this week to mostly a chorus of accolades, gets its zip from silicon provided by Texas Instruments.
Inside the rival to the Apple iPhone 4 is a new TI OMAP 3630 chip, a big upgrade from the 3430 silicon used in the current Motorola Droid. TI got almost a two-fold speed spike from the new OMAP 3630 chip via design modifications and by moving to an advanced 45-nanometer manufacturing process, according to Brian Carlson, OMAP product line manager at Texas Instruments.
"We increased both the graphics and processor performance by over 80 percent," Carlson said in a phone interview, adding that the new process along with chip design tweaks allowed TI to also lower power consumption between 30 percent and 50 percent, depending on what the user is doing.
"The first thing you'll notice is that the Droid X is much snappier, much faster. Web browsing is one of the key areas. Running a (graphics intensive) Web page, comparing the Droid to the Droid X, it goes from about eight seconds down to below five seconds," he said.
Carlson also explained that other factors come into play beyond reaching the 1GHz milestone. "It's not just about the gigahertz. It's about your memory subsystem. Our memory bandwidth and how we feed these (processing) engines make an incredible… Read more
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