The smartphone guts race just got a bit more interesting – dark horse Marvell has just outed the first ever 1.5GHz ARM tri-core mobile processor. The Armada 628 pairs two high-performance cores with one optimised for low-power. Take that, Snapdragon. More »
If I had $US1 million I would buy 10,000 of these Marvell Plug Computer 3.0, with a 2GHz Armada 300 CPU, Wi-Fi and Linux 2.6, and build myself a supercomputer. It’s either that or cocktails. More »
In addition to the chipmaker ARM, everybody and their mother is showing off their own flavour of the first official prototype Google Android phones at MWC today: ARM, Texas Instruments, Marvell, Qualcomm, NEC and ST Microelectronics, to name a few. Definitely expect some first gropes of Android on real hardware later today—hopefully these are the droids we’re looking for. [Yahoo!/AP]
Marvell’s launching a new chip for more efficient power supplies that cuts down energy use by automatically adjusting the amount of juice drawn by a computer depending on what it actually needs, slashing waste—it can chop peak energy use by up to 50 percent, according to Marvell.
It also supposedly rolls the functionality of 20 components into the single processor, allowing for the “Honey I Shrunk the Power Brick” magic (by up to a third) at lower costs for OEM manufacturers. When we talked with Hubie Notohamiprodjo, general manager of industrial control and power management, he said we could probably expect products with the new chips to start showing up in a few months.
While we’ll see them in desktop and notebook power supplies first—Marvell’s hitting them because of the size of computers’ carbon footprint and its potential reduction—they could also make their way into flatscreen TVs, portables and other consumer electronics. It was tipped that they’re talking to at least one manufacturer now. Even if green tech’s not really your bag—or hell, even if it didn’t actually save that much power —carrying around a smaller notebook power brick is reason enough for us to give it a thumbs up. More »
