Texas Instruments OMAP

The folks at iFixit are performing its usual teardown ritual today. This time it has a full breakdown of Amazon’s new Kindle Fire HD announced earlier this month. One of the teardown highlights: the device includes a 3.7 V, 4400 mAh, 16.43 Wh Li-ion battery that has about the same juice as the previous-generation Kindle Fires, which means the 11 hours of expected battery life is up for debate. Other findings: The Kindle Fire HD sports an upgraded Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM from Elpida, a LCD from LG Display, and 16GB of flash memory from Samsung. Overall, the device scores a decent 7 out of 10 repairability score, which ties with the Nexus 7 and beats the third-generation iPad.

-Samsung KLMAG2GE4A eMMC 16 GB Flash Memory and Flash Memory Controller
-Elpida B8164B3PF-1D-F 8 Gb (1 GB) DDR2 RAM
-Texas Instruments TWL6032 Fully Integrated Power Management IC
-Broadcom BCM2076 GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, and FM Receiver/Transmitter
-Wolfson WM8962E Ultra-Low Power Stereo CODEC
-B50 5222 12507A9A10

iFixit’s notes on the teardown are below:

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kgPlsczhZg]

In January, Texas Instruments’ Vice President said his company’s upcoming dual-core OMAP 5 application processor for smartphones, tablets and e-readers would be “way ahead of Apple.” Today, we saw a glimpse that proved a dual-core OMAP 5 is capable of outclassing a typical quad-core processor.

For the sake of better understanding, the current-generation OMAP 4 chip inside Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus smartphone is based on a dual-core 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU with 1GB RAM and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The closest kin to the upcoming OMAP 5 chip, however, is Nvidia’s much-hyped Tegra 3 processor. You could argue that the OMAP 5 vs. Tegra 3 comparison is not entirely fair. As much as the OMAP 5 platform is “only” dual-core, it sports ARM’s newer and much improved Cortex-A15 CPU design. Moreover, while Tegra 3 features four processing cores and an additional specialized core, Nvidia’s chip is based on the older-generation Cortex-A9 CPU design.

In addition, even though the OMAP 4 clocks at just 800MHz versus Tegra 3’s 1.4GHz, the former packs in specialized cores and accelerators that help improve performance a great deal. The crux: A dual-core OMAP 5 (left) handily beats a quad-core device (right) in page rendering—all the while downloading videos and playing music. It is just another example of how silicon blueprints from United Kingdom-based fables semiconductor maker ARM Holdings dominate the mobile industry.

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