Every technology has a tipping point, a moment at which it proves itself worthwhile. With tablet computing the moment might be on us with the announcement of Texas Instruments' OMAP 5 series of system-on-a-chips (SOCs; essentially, CPUs for mobile devices). Almost unbelievably, OMAP 5 offers quad-core computing at up to 2GHz with power consumption barely breaking into double-digit wattage figures. In terms of raw figures, that level of performance is very near that of current Intel and AMD desktop chips.
In actual fact, however, the OMAP 5 series is now quad-core in the desktop CPU sense; the chip actually contains two Cortex-A15 cores, which is where the real power lies--and two Cortex-M4 cores, which are there to take care of day-to-day work such as keeping the display alive while the device is in sleep mode. The A15 cores can be clocked up to 2GHz each and will remain dormant unless needed.

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