Though its current generation of advanced multimedia phone processors has yet to hit the market in the U.S., Texas Instruments this week went ahead and unveiled the next generation. At the 3GSM World Congress, TI detailed a chipset that an Alcatel executive described as packing the combined power of a PC, a gaming console and a digital camcorder.

Called OMAP 3, the new processor line will have the computing power of a top-of-the-line Pentium II, the graphics rendering and gaming capabilities of the original Sony Playstation and the video quality of a top of the line digital camcorder, said Gilles Delfassy, senior vice president for the wireless terminals unit at TI.

“We’re moving the bar again—we think by a quantum a leap,” Delfassy said.

TI said it would begin sampling the chipset this year with commercial production expected to begin 12 months later. That will probably be enough time for TI’s current-generation multimedia workhorse to make it into U.S. phones. The OMAP 2 has been implemented in many Japanese handsets, but vendors have yet to release the first OMAP 2-powered phones in a western market. Delfassy said that day was coming soon as TI has already shipped millions of the processors to its vendor customers.

The OMAP 2 already has impressive capabilities with built in support for high-resolution video and 3D gaming, but Delfassy said the OMAP 3 will far surpass it. The first chipset in the line, OMAP 3430, will be able to deliver high-definition-quality video, allowing their users to play TV clips stored on their phones over a full-sized TV through an S-Video output, he said. It will also be able to capture a 12 megapixel image with less than one –second shot delay and render PC quality 3D graphics for gaming, he added.

The chipset will be built off of the new ARM Cortex microprocessor core, which TI said would deliver three times the performance of the ARM11 core used in OMAP 2.