Texas Instruments: The New Force in Palm's Cellphone Chips

TI, which has decided to exit the market for baseband chips, seems to be the big winner in the new device. The company provided Palm with a chip called the OMAP 3430, which has an application processor design called the Cortex A-8 from ARM Holdings that is two or three times more powerful than its predecessors, estimates Jeff Dougan, a TI director of product management.

TI’s OMAP line also contains other speciality blocks of circuitry, known as cores in industry parlance. One is a digital signal processor to accelerate high-quality video capture and playback. Another core manages three-dimensional graphics. Still another manages photographic images.

But Palm didn’t go the single-chip route with the Pre, iSuppli notes in a report issued Wednesday. It did choose Qualcomm for baseband technology, but broke from a common pattern by choosing alternative suppliers for the application processor (TI) and power management chip (Maxim Integrated Products).