Difference Between Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 and 4460

Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 vs 4460 | TI OMAP 4460 vs 4430 Speed, Performance
 

This article compares a couple of System-on-Chips (SoC) recently designed and manufactured by Texas Instruments (TI) targeting handheld devices. In a Layperson’s term, a SoC is a computer on a single IC (Integrated Circuit, aka chip). Technically, a SoC is an IC that integrates typical components on a computer (such as microprocessor, memory, input/output) and other systems that cater electronic and radio functionalities. TI released OMAP 4430 in the first quarter of 2011 and released its successor, OMAP 4460, in the last quarter of 2011. TI designed its OMAP (abbreviation for Open Multimedia Application Platform) SoCs to drive smart-phones, tablets and other multimedia-rich mobile devices.  Both 4430 and 4460 are TI’s fourth generation OMAPs.

Typically, the major components of a SoC are its CPU (Central Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). The CPUs in both OMAP 4430 and OMAP 4460 are based on ARM’s (Advanced RICS – Reduced Instruction Set Computer – Machine, developed by ARM Holdings) v7 ISA (Instruction Set Architecture, the one that is used as the starting place of designing a processor), and their GPUs are based on PowerVR’s SGX540. Both the SoCs are manufactured using a semiconductor technology known as 45nm.

TI OMAP 4430

OMAP 4430 was released in the first quarter of 2011 and according to PDAdb.net it was deployed first in BlackBerry’s Playbook. Many other devices such as phones, PDAs and tablets, later used it. PandaBoard, a famous community supported adacemic development board, had OMAP 4430 as its main processor. The CPU used in OMAP 4430 is ARM’s dual core CoteX A9 architecture and the GPU used was PowerVR’s SGX540. In OMAP 4430, the CPU was clocked at 1GHz, and the GPU was clocked at 304MHz (which is relatively higher compared to the clocking of the same GPU in other SoCs where SGX540 was deployed). The chip was packed with both L1 and L2 cache hierarchies in its dual core CPU and is packaged with a 1GB DDR2 low power RAM.

TI OMAP 4460

OMAP 4460 was released in the fourth quarter of 2011 and according to PDAdb.net it was first deployed in Archos’s ninth generation tablet PCs. It is the SoC of choice for the forthcoming (to be released in mid November 2011) Google’s Galaxy Nexus smartphone manufactured by Samsung for Google. OMAP 4460 uses the same CPU and GPU as OMAP 4430; however, both are clocked at higher frequencies, 1.5GHz and 384MHz respectively. The chip is packed with similar cache and memory hierarchies.

A comparison between OMAP 4430 and OMAP 4460 is tabulated below.

Summary 

In summary, OMAP 4460 is faster than OMAP 4430 as expected. However, the similarities between OMAP 4430 and 4460 are many compared to their differences. The main difference between the two is the performance improvement achieved in OMAP 4460 over OMAP 4430 through faster clocking of both its CPU and GPU.