In a not surprising move Texas Instruments is about to sell off OMAP, the division that makes the ARM-based SoC designs. Texas Instruments with its OMAP series is one of the major players for smartphones and tablets and its OMAP5 is expected to be the first with ARM Cortex-A15.
It is still unclear as to exactly why Texas Instruments would want to sell its OMAP division that do SoC designs but according to SemiAccurate a sale is not far away. Considering Texas Instruments is one of the biggest players today with several chips out on the market or coming with Windows 8 support, but also a very aggressive roadmap. With that in mind it could be a smart move to sell OMAP while it is ahead.
Who the buyer will be we can only speculate, but that it is a competitor to OMAP doesn’t feel likely since they have their own roadmaps and intellectual property. NVIDIA are still pretty fresh here and have acquired several companies, smaller and bigger to broaden its patent portfolio and expand the functionality of Tegra.
Intel has said that ARM is not a threat to PCs and an acquisition of OMAP could mean the end to its Atom architecture in the long run. AMD has earlier stated that it is not interested in ARM for its Fusion processors and the question if it has the finances for an acquisition of this caliber. It doesn’t look like AMD or Intel is moving outside the x86 sphere anytime soon.
It is more likely that a phone manufacturer will acquire the OMAP division. That way it can tailor its SoC designs after its specific needs. Nokia is said to use OMAP cirucits in its Windows Phone 7 phones.
We can only speculate in who would like to buy OMAP, but if the source is correct the sale of the OMAP division is near and when it is announced we will know who the buyer is.
Source: Semiaccurate
