Marvell is a company you don’t hear about all too often these days. When it comes to the chips that power our favorite mobile devices, there’s a high probability that there’s Qualcomm silicon inside, followed by NVIDIA, and then finally Texas Instruments. That’s due to change according to a rumor from Semi Accurate, who says that Marvell will soon introduce a new processor that they built from scratch, but is ARM compatible. Some backstory: Most chipset makers (ST-Ericsson, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, even Apple) make chips that use application processors designed by ARM and then slap their own set of components around said ARM processor, things such as the graphics processor. Qualcomm is special because they don’t use generic ARM cores, they instead license the ARM architecture and then make their own custom processor that is compatible with the ARM instruction set. The current Snapdragon products out on the market use “Scorpion” processors, and their next generation, due out by the end of this year hopefully, will be known as “Krait”. Marvell is going to pull a Qualcomm and make their own custom chip that’s faster than an ARM Cortex A9 (currently found in the NVIDIA Tegra 2 and Apple A5), but slower than an ARM Cortex A15, the next generation of ARM processor that has yet to be used in any retail products.
Said Marvell chip is making the other players in the mobile chipset game “quite nervous”, which has us rather excited since we’ve got a need for speed. The difficult task for Marvell will be to convince hardware vendors that they should use their chips for building future products. It’s safe to say that if Google doesn’t optimize Android for this monster chip, then it’ll likely die on the vine and end up in some low volume tablet running a non mainstream operating system.
Watch this space for further development!