Can anyone share their thoughts of TI’s demise of the OMAP group and what this means to Beagleboard XM and PandaBoard? Are these platforms a dead end at this point?
I seem to ask this daily, but, who exactly told you OMAP died?
TI’s press releases on their withdrawal from the mobile market imply the end of the OMAP line. But, is that true or is that just a poorly worded press release. I know it’s got my customers who were trying to work with OMAP 4 scrambling to come up with an alternate supplier.
The PR also mentioned other markets for OMAP. FWIW, xM doesn’t have an OMAP branded part on it, so maybe it’s best to separate that from Pandaboard to start…especially since they are different communities with different people involved.
http://www.androidized.com/texas-instruments-withdraws-from-smartphones/
True. Although it’s not clear how the DM3730 fits into the overall OMAP family – if it does at all. Is DaVinci part of OMAP or not? What about dual-core Sitara parts?
Instead, Delagi said, TI plans to re-profile its R&D investment to focus on the embedded market, where he said the company could bring OMAP and its connectivity technologies to a much broader set of customers serving applications like industrial automation, automotive and the “Internet of things.”
“We have a lot of work to do to re-profile the investments that we’ve got as we shift our focus from our historical space in wireless and smartphones and tablets and focus on the embedded area for both OMAP and connectivity,” Delagi said.
In the embedded processing space, TI’s OMAP and connectivity solutions generate about $400 million in revenue annually from a base of about 4,000 customers, Delagi said. In smartphones and tablets, OMAP and connectivity chips generate about $900 million from roughly 10 customers, he said.
Delagi said TI currently ranks second in sales of embedded processors with 12 percent market share. “That, by definition, says that there’s 88 percent of the market that we still have a chance to grow. It’s a huge opportunity for us,” he said.
Yeah, the broader embedded market is even more so the focus for OMAP–and DM3730 was the embedded focused version of OMAP3. Of course, BeagleBone is a using a Sitara device, not OMAP or DaVinci, so it is unaffected.
Davinci, Jacinto, Sitara, Keystone, and OMAP are all different brand names for different markets (some of those markets overlap). As most people know though, there’s an “omap” (I specifically use lowercase) architecture that loosely binds most of these together…more so on some of the DM, AM, and OMAP parts you find sharing the same code base in things like the kernel.
Even on other parts there’s a lot of IP reused as you see things like the EDMA DMAC on a discrete c6k part but also on an “omap” AM335x. If you are looking for some unified master vision you probably won’t find it. 
I’m just trying to determine where we go from here WRT reference boards. The Beaglebone is a great platform for the lower end of the embedded space. But, what happens to the mid and high-end of that space? Does this mean the end of Gumstix for instance? I’ve got customers that were focused on OMAP4 for several products. These announcements have them thinking Qualcomm, NVidia, FreeScale, etc.
@Mike_Anderson not surprising. I think it’s natural for people to be worried about the level of support they will get after such an announcement. I suspect some concern would also be generated by the size of the reduction too.
I think it’ll take a minute for the dust to settle to figure out what TI is delivering at the mid-high end, but it certainly isn’t going away. Keystone at the high-end continues to grow. Sitara at the mid-low range is really taking off. OMAP/DaVinci are still very committed in between, but the make-up and focus is certainly different. Expect continued offerings in the automotive, video security, etc. spaces and support for OMAP in the broader embedded market. It isn’t going away—it just needs to communicate its new identity.
Of course, lots of detailed discussions happened lately on this topic (including this thread), trying to show the positive side of mobile de-prioritization, but there will still be concern at least initially, which is natural…