A few days ago, Texas Instruments strongly hinted, in an email statement to Neowin, that the company would not be releasing any processors that would be used for tablets running on Microsoft"s Windows RT operating system. Today, the other shoe dropped as the company officially announced its exit from the smartphone and tablet chip business.
In a press release today, TI revealed that the company will now " ... focus its OMAP processors and wireless connectivity solutions on a broader set of embedded applications with long life cycles, instead of its historical focus on the mobile market where large customers are increasingly developing their own custom chips." These changes also mean that 1,700 people in the company will now be laid off.
TI announced in June 2011 it would launch its OMAP4470 processor, which it said would run "operating systems such as Android, Linux and the next version of Microsoft Windows." It reconfirmed those plans for the processor in January at CES 2012. In June, as part of Computex, TI actually showed some prototype Windows RT tablets running on its processor.
With today"s announcement, that means NVIDIA and Qualcomm will be the only two ARM-based processor makers who will be creating chips that will run on Windows RT.
Source: Texas Instruments | Image via Texas Instruments