News - Texas Instruments winds down mobile processor business

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It’s just too competitive and lacking in profits for TI. 1,700 workers are expected to lose jobs.

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Read more.

"Whatever happens, the cuts are expected to save $450 per annum so the plan will not take long to show rewards on TI’s balance sheet."

So long as your definition of not long is millions of years...

Are they basically admitting OMAP5 is pants then... and they can't be bothered to catch up in a low margin market? Seems odd, the OMAP4 was pretty good when it came out and quite competitive, got plenty of design wins and OMAP5 on paper looks good... and it's not like TI are a small company with no resources.

If OMAP5 is just a bog standard ARM design (it's 2xA15, 2xM4 big.little AFAIK) and they are losing out to the Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple customised designs then its not a good thing for ARM Holdings as it implies you need to customise designs with the ARM architecture to be competitive in the high end? I'd have thought they get a lot more money for the CPU designs than just the instruction set licence.

Samsung Exynos 5 uses standard CPU+GPU cores. OMAP uses PowerVR graphucs instead of ARM Mali.

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Originally Posted by watercooled

Samsung Exynos 5 uses standard CPU+GPU cores. OMAP uses PowerVR graphucs instead of ARM Mali.

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Then I wonder why if Samsung are all stock design too that TI think they can't compete? Just seems odd really, they seemed to be competing just fine, Qualcomm just had some great results so there must be money in there somewhere. Ah well...

It takes a heck of a lot of R&D and money to design custom cores, there's only really Qualcomm and now Apple using them in the mobile market. Differentiation lies with the SoC itself, there's far more to it than just a CPU+GPU.

AFAIK,TI were making money with the OMAP business,so perhaps they are more concerned with margins?? IBM after all ditched its consumer computer business to Lenovo(who are doing very well with it),and moved onto areas with far better margins and a slower race to the bottom.