According the the article, TI is "eliminating 1,700 jobs in their mobile processor business unit" and will "stop developing new chips." You call it refocusing, I call it to terminate with extreme prejudice. Either way, it's the end of the line for OMAP CPUs.

OMAP is not just mobile processors. "...TI wants to sell its OMAP processors in markets that require less investment, like industrial clients like carmakers." So no, they are not shutting down OMAP, they are shutting down the OMAP lines that feed consumer electronics.

Their future hardware IP design work is effective(ly) dead. Embedded on OMAP has always been a derivative of the R&D invested for the mobile market. You can also look at the Sitara products which are respins of OMAP IPs with a few needs for embedded.

that makes sense, because almost no application of OMAP really used all it's features (notably embedded DSP core), only significant consumer/mobile application I can think of are Nokia's phones based on Symbian EKA2, which are effectively dead now (and OMAP combined with EKA2 was significant competitive advantage for Nokia when they wasn't, as that enabled them to replace their ARM-based custom SoC with OMAP and build smartphones essentially derived from feature phone hardware without dedicated baseband CPU). Before that (early 00's) there wasn't any other real SoC solution, as most other mobile processors required some external (mobile-specific: touch screen, power management...) support circuitry and OMAP previosly filled this niche, now it seems that there isn't any real makret for OMAP SoC's as nobody is interested in building anything that leverages OMAP architecture, because random mobile SoCs paired with some generic baseband are cheaper and consumers does not seem to care about battery life.

It does not make sense to develop hardware which nobody really uses and try to be price competitive with cheaper designs that are adequate for most customers.

The Blackberry DevAlpha A&B devices are OMAP 4460 & 4470 respectively. The battery life is remarkable. The performance on this dev alpha really puts tegra3 to shame.

The big win for me for OMAP5 was going to be using the ISP pipeline for vision and feature extraction especially with the low latencies provided by qnx. Linux is not even in the same league.

I am very disappointed about this announcement as this group consistently created industry-leading innovations. When I first heard they were trying to find an acquisition partner I also assumed Amazon would pick them up. I wonder what factors prevented this?

The OMAP4 has dedicated video encode decode, dedicated "still image" processor, and a general purpose DSP (which isn't used for the most part and would be a lot slower than the dedicated hardware units).

EDIT: The thing though is that its footprint is so small that it doesn't matter much.

Indeed, The article itself confuses the issue too, mentioning that fact while also referring to TI looking to sell the entire division, as if mobile devices were the only market. Its worth noting that TI still manufactures ARM-based chips for more complex systems, which may be part of their motivation for the OMAP move.

Also, completely irrelevant to the point, TI is based in Dallas, not Austin.

> They are not shutting it down, "refocusing" = cutting jobs ans shutting down plants ( and they do cut 1700 of them ), refocusing is just the expression suited for the "yesmen".