Marvell ARMADA: Giving the Qualcomm Snapdragon and TI OMAP 3 scurvy and crabs
By Stefan Constantinescu on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 7:37 AM PST In New Hardware
Update: This post has some factually incorrect data, for more information click here.
Marvell, who owns Intel’s former XScale Division, the group within Intel who worked on ARM chips until 2006, has recently unveiled a new system on chip processor family called ARMADA. Their caps lock key must’ve been broken when naming that sucker, so from here on out I’ll simply refer to it as Armada. While Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) (NSDQ: QCOM) and Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) (NYSE: TXN) took ARM’s ready designed Cortex A8 processor and integrated it into their respective system on a chip dies, Qualcomm making the Snapdragon, and TI making the OMAP 3, Marvell has a license for the actual Cortex A8 architecture schematics, which they’ve taken the liberty of tweaking to make their Armada family more powerful. In the process however they managed to chop off support for ARM’s NEON SIMDfp instruction set. Confused? Don’t be. What you need to know as a consumer looking to purchase a spiffy new expensive smartphone is that anything with an Armda 500 or 600 series processor is going to be ultra power efficient thanks to being made on a 55 nanometer process, and that said device is going be crazy fast. Stupid fast. M-m-m-ega fast. Arrr! Expect devices with an Armada chip inside to be on the market in early 2010.
