Our informal avoidance of ARM news didn’t last 24 hours, but for good reason. Marvell Semiconductor Inc. launched the ARM-based Armada processor this week, and explicitly mentioned smartbooks as a target market. Is Marvell late to the party? Perhaps not, for two reasons: First, the company has several years’ experience developing low-cost communication chips, precisely the realm where smartbooks will shine. Second, Marvell acquired several embedded communication processor products from Intel Corp., so it has a customer base in the U.S. and Asia that fits with potential smartbook (and smartphone) development.
This is where things get interesting. Traditionally, Broadcom and Marvell have been brutal competitors in wireline communication realms, and even a few wireless areas. Last month, Broadcom licensed ARM and we weighed in on Broadcom’s chances. But Broadcom still is talking about ARM potential. Marvell’s Armada is ready for early sampling.
The Armada 500 series, aimed specifically at smartbooks, features a CPU running up to 1.2 GHz, a single-instruction/multiple-data MMX2 co-processor, a vector floating-point arithmetic unit, and 512 Kbytes of Level 2 cache memory. It can access any generation of SDRAM up to DDR3. Marvell claims that these features make it ideal for HD 1080p video, as well as 2D and 3D graphics acceleration.
Other members of the Armada family support different consumer devices, and all family members support accelerated Adobe Flash. The 600 series, for example, is aimed at smartphones, while the 1000 series is intended for high-end video platforms such as HDTVs and set-top boxes.
In theory, this week’s ARM licensee rush could propel several chip manufacturers into a smartbook space. In practice, Marvell may end up being the nearest-term challenger to Qualcomm and Nvidia.
Loring
