OMAP 4 devices and development tools are scheduled to be sampling in the second half of the year, with volume production expected by the second half of 2010.

"We are again taking a revolutionary strep in performance and power consumption so as to meet the users' and the industry's hunger for amazing new applications on their mobiles, be they smartphones or Mobile Internet Devices," Robert Tolbert, platform marketing manager for the OMAP business unit told EE Times .

Separately, TI is also expanding its OMAP 3 range with the addition of several products being made in a 45-nm process, with the OMAP36x range featuring speeds up to 1GHz.

A third announcement at the Mobile World Congress here related to an enhanced version of the OMAP 3 processor based development platform, the Zoom 34x-II MDP made by Logic.

But it is the extension to the fourth generation, just two years after it unveiled the OMAP 3, which grabbed the mobile sector's imagination.

According to Tolbert, the hugely powerful SoC will deliver "stunning multimedia performance for "applications that are only just being conceived."

OMAP 4 will deliver 1080p video record and playback, 20 megapixel imaging and almost a week of audio play time and a potential 10x faster Web page loading time, more than 7x higher computing performance, 6x higher video resolution, 10x better graphics performance.

What has not changed from the previous generation is the four main blocks that make up the single device, all of which can be controlled independently and thus allowing parallel processing for applications to run simultaneously.

There is a general-purpose processing function based on the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore supporting symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and capable of speeds of more than 1GHz per core; multimedia hardware accelerators based on TI's programmable C64x DSP; a programmable graphics engine; and an Image Signal Processor (ISP) for what is described as "unparalleled" video and imaging performance.

The latest generation platform will be built on a 45-nm process "but as you can see with what we are doing now with the 36xx range, which started being manufactured at 65-nm, the OMAP 4 devices will, in time, be made on, for example, a 32-nm process technology" said Tolbert.

He added the OMAP 4 platform will support popular leading mobile operating systems such as Symbian, Lunux, Windows Mobile, LiMo and the Android.