CES 2012: Texas Instruments Demos OMAP-Based Windows 8 Tablet

Texas Instruments became on of the first companies to showcase an actual ARM-based tablet running Windows 8 at the CES 2012.

TI OMAP Runs Windows 8 Tablet At CES 2012

Texas instruments is a computer chipmaker based in the US and it specializes in creating ARM-based SoC’s called OMAP. These chips are the alternative to popular mobile chips such as the SnapDragon from Qualcomm. Texas Instruments is currently showing off an OMAP-based tablet at the CES 2012 show in Las Vegas, US. In doing so, they have become one of the first companies to be actually showing a pre-released version of Windows 8 on ARM.

It has to be kept in mind that the preview build of Windows 8 that Microsoft has been circulating is for x86 architecture only (i.e. Intel and AMD chips). The company promised that ARM support was coming soon but so far there has been no public preview release of the ARM version of Windows 8. At the CES opening Keynote, Microsoft did talk about the Beta again and showed off a tablet running on ARM but did not say anything specific about the public availability of Windows 8 for ARM. However, it is quite possible that the Beta will come with two versions — one for x86 and ARM — so that developers of architectures can start building apps before the commercial launch of the OS.

The tablet being shown off by Texas Instruments is running OMAP4470, which is a multi-core SoC that has graphics from PowerVR using the SGX544 GPU. PowerVR has become the favorite company for collaborating with SoC makers to provide the best possible mobile graphics. Their only competition right now is NVIDIA’s Tegra SoC, which is not at version 3. Incidentally, the ARM tablet shown off at the CES 2012 Keynote was running on Tegra 3. Tegra is an SoC that is also based on ARM.

The OMAP processor mentioned here is powerful enough to smoothly playback full HD videos and also handle gaming and other processing and graphics rich applications.