Don't get me wrong, I don't want to bash on the Pyra team in any way. It is a great thing you guys are building a successor to the Pandora. And if the reason for choosing a TI SoC again is the familiarity with TI, I can understand that, but that has never been mentioned as a reason as far as I know. The thing with Intel (or any other manufacturer for that matter) possibly discontiuning parts of their SoC business is kind of a strange reason for choosing one or another, I think. Even if a manufacturer does not say they'll be discontinuing their SoC business does not mean they won't do that in the near future, and yes, CrazyIvan is right that Intel does not plan to discontinue their tablet SoCs.
When it comes to Intel, I specifically meant their tablet SoC, not those phone SoC with PowerVR graphics. Those are more comparable to Cortex-A15 anyway. The A15 is not meant as a phone CPU, but rather a tablet CPU because of its fairly large power consumption (A15 implementations can dissipate up to 8 W). In those cases where the A15 is actually used in phones, it is usually used in that big.LITTLE configuration (which can't be used with the OMAP anyway).
When it comes to binary compatibility, this will be at least tricky even with that TI OMAP, because switching to hard float causes compatibility problems anyway. Also for binary compatibility, all those old Pandora libraries would need to be available.
Edit: About TI moving from consumer SoC to automotive/industrial SoC. I don't know exactly, what they are going to do, but usually automotive parts and especially industrial SoC have a fairly different feature set than those SoC used in phnoes and tablets. So I'm not sure if that would be of any use for future Pyra devices.
They use less power (both when idle and under load) than the Cortex-A15 cores while being more powerful and come with a GPU with open source drivers and full OpenGL support.
