Texas Instruments introduced the Sitara AM3715 and AM3703 microprocessor units (MPUs) with 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8. Both the AM3715 and AM3703 offer a nearly 40% increase in ARM performance. developers can increase application battery life with up to 30% decrease in power consumption compared to previous MPUs in the Sitara family. The AM3703 can be utilized for applications not requiring graphics. Offering double the graphics performance over previous Sitara devices, the AM3715 enables fluid, complex 3D rendering, picture-perfect visuals and increased graphical user interface (GUI) capabilities. Both the AM3715 and AM3703 offer a nearly 40 percent increase in ARM performance, and developers can increase application battery life with up to 30 percent decrease in power consumption compared to previous MPUs in the Sitara family.
Scalability within the Sitara ARM MPU product family, enabled by the AM3715 and AM3703 processors, allows for increased headroom to protect product investments for customization and product lifecycle enhancements. The AM37x MPUs are code compatible with TI's OMAP35x and Sitara AM35x line of processors. Pin-to-pin compatibility between the AM3715 and AM3703 enables designers to easily scale their end products to the defined performance requirements.
Features
- AM3715/03 Applications Processor:
- Compatible to OMAP 3 Architecture
- MPU Subsystem
- 1-GHz ARM Cortex-A8 Core
- NEON SIMD Coprocessor
- POWERVR SGX Graphics Accelerator (AM3715 only)
- Tile Based Architecture Delivering up to 20 MPoly/sec
- Universal Scalable Shader Engine: Multi-threaded Engine Incorporating Pixel and Vertex Shader Functionality
- Industry Standard API Support: OpenGLES 1.1 and 2.0, OpenVG1.0
- Fine Grained Task Switching, Load Balancing, and Power Management
- Programmable High Quality Image Anti-Aliasing
- External Memory Interfaces:
- SDRAM Controller (SDRC)
- 16, 32-bit Memory Controller With 1G-Byte Total Address Space
- Interfaces to Low-Power SDRAM
- SDRAM Memory Scheduler (SMS) and Rotation Engine
- General Purpose Memory Controller (GPMC)
- 16-bit Wide Multiplexed Address/Data Bus
- Up to 8 Chip Select Pins With 128M-Byte Address Space per Chip Select Pin
- Glueless Interface to NOR Flash, NAND Flash (With ECC Hamming Code Calculation), SRAM and Pseudo-SRAM
Linux and Windows Embedded CE software packages are provided with example applications, development environment and system utilities. These software packages provide existing customers and developers an easy software migration path while providing a scalable silicon hardware platform for product enhancements through the Sitara ARM MPUs and DaVinci video processors. The large community of open source developers for the BeagleBoard and BeagleBoard-xM (based on the Sitara AM37x MPU) from Digi-Key, third-party network offerings and TI-provided support resources also help make development easier for designers.
Tools and software
Customers can start developing their designs today with the TMDXEVM3715 evaluation module (EVM) for $1,495. The software development kit includes a Linux kernel 2.6.32 board support package complete with Graphical User Interface, Graphics, Applications, demonstrations and development utilities.
