Items tagged with Marvell
Solid State Drives continue to be one of the more sought after (and effective) upgrades for both desktop and mobile systems. But as drives have matured, and newer generations have been released, the bandwidth limitations of the legacy SATA interface have become increasingly more apparent. Even relatively affordable, mainstream solid state drives are bumping into the SATA bandwidth limit right alongside more expensive flagship drives, which makes it difficult to differentiate between them based on performance alone.The answer to eliminating the bandwidth limitations of the SATA interface is PCI...
Read more...
Google’s Project Ara modular smartphone project took a huge leap forward in late October, as the company for the first time publicly showed a fully functional prototype device running Android. At the time Google also discussed the promising progress that was being made moving from Spiral 1 prototypes to more space-efficient Spiral 2 prototypes. This month, Google is ready to provide another update on the status of Project Ara and there are plenty of juicy details to savor. Ara project leader Paul Eremenko was delighted to announce that his team received three demo units of Spiral 2 prototypes from...
Read more...
A few weeks back, we took a look at a new series of solid state drives from Crucial, the M550, which leveraged Marvell controller technology, 20nm MLC NAND flash memory, and firmware optimizations gleaned from the last couple of years of SATA SSD advancements. Ultimately, we found the M550 series of drives to be solid offerings, with well-rounded performance and competitive pricing. Well, today, another major player—ADATA—is releasing its own family of drives featuring similar technology at its core. The brand new ADATA SP920 Premiere Pro family of drives we’ll be showing you...
Read more...
A few weeks back, we took a look at a new series of solid state drives from Crucial, the M550, which leveraged Marvell controller technology, 20nm MLC NAND flash memory, and firmware optimizations gleaned from the last couple of years of SATA SSD advancements. Ultimately, we found the M550 series of drives to be solid offerings, with well-rounded performance and competitive pricing. Well, today, another major player—ADATA—is releasing its own family of drives featuring similar technology at its core. The brand new ADATA SP920 Premiere Pro family of drives we’ll be showing you...
Read more...
Samsung's Galaxy Tab 3 Lite is going global and it's bringing Marvell's ARMADA Mobile PXA986 platform with it, Marvell announced today. The ARMADA Mobile PXA986 is a unified multi-core platform offering support for both 3G and LTE in a single-chip package. It's based on ARM's 1.2GHz dual-core Cortex A9 application processor and also features an advanced mutli-mode HSPA+ modem supporting Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) and 2G networks. "The launch of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite global tablet is an important milestone to bring affordable high performance mobile devices to the mass...
Read more...
MiiPC, a kid-friendly, cloud-managed, Android-based computer has offered both desktop use, media center applications, and it also offers a new level of Android gaming by incorporating Cannonball from 18th Parallel. The MiiPC now supports Android gaming with a number of third-party gamepads, including Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Logitech controllers. There are over 100 kid-friendly titles you can choose from. Designed to be hooked up to a monitor and used as a desktop or connected to your TV for media center and gaming purposes, the MiiPC offers multiple user accounts and cloud-based parental controls...
Read more...
Keeping the smart TV movement alive, Marvell today announced its ARMADA 1500 Plus (88DE3108) System-on-Chip (SoC) platform designed for smart video products based on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. The Full HD media processor is intended for retail OEM TV and box suppliers looking to differentiate themselves from what's becoming a crowded field. "I believe this is the beginning of the new era of Smart TV, high quality multi-screen experience on a global scale to the masses. I am very pleased to see the leadership of Google and the progress and effort in achieving this major milestone for the development...
Read more...
Over the past few years, a handful of mobile graphics companies have emerged as key pillars of the industry. The biggest dog on the block, by far, has been Imagination Technologies, with Qualcomm, NVIDIA and ARM all picking up significant businesses of their own as well. But now, there's a new kid on the block -- a company with a tiny, highly customized GPU, a number of recent design wins, and a strong product portfolio. Enter Vivante. According to research from Jon Peddie, Vivante has surged from a 0.3% market share in 2012 to 9.8% of the market in 2013, thanks to multiple design wins both in...
Read more...
Over the past few years, a handful of mobile graphics companies have emerged as key pillars of the industry. The top dog, by far, has been Imagination Technologies, with Qualcomm, Nvidia (during the Tegra 2 / Tegra 3 era) and ARM all picking up significant businesses of their own as well. But now, there's a new kid on the block -- a company with a tiny, highly customized GPU, a number of recent design wins, and a strong product portfolio. Enter Vivante. According to research from Jon Peddie, Vivante has surged from a 0.3% market share in 2012 to 9.8% of the market in 2013, thanks to multiple...
Read more...
Google's Chromecast has made a fairly impressive splash in the TV market, as well as the streaming market. Unlike Google TV, which felt cost prohibitive for most, the $35 Chromecast is well within the impulse buy range for most of its target market. Early reviews on the product have been fairly positive, and you may be wondering what sort of innards are pushing things out. If so, Marvell has the answer. Marvell today revealed the Armada 1500-mini, a solution that was seemingly built from the ground-up for Chromecast. It was built to support low-power applications (like TV dongles), as well as to...
Read more...
Good golly, the iFixit folks are fast; just days after Google announced its Chromecast media streaming device, we already have a look inside the small dongle. It’s a simple device, really; there’s a small motherboard assembly inside the plastic case, and the motherboard itself has four chips on it. iFixit Chromecast teardown (credit: iFixit) The colors have been added for clarity by iFixit, but the red one is an AzureWave 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM combo chip, and the orange one is a Marvell DE3005-A1 SoC. On the other side, there’s a 16Gb (2GB) Micron NAND flash chip...
Read more...
Marvell on Thursday said it plans to appeal a jury verdict awarding Carnegie Mellon University $1.17 billion in damages for patent infringement claims brought against the company. At the center of the dispute are two patents -- U.S. Patent 6,201,839 and 6,438,180 -- that a federal jury found Marvell and its U.S. operating subsidiary, Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. (MSI), had infringed upon, resulting in one of the biggest awards ever by a U.S. jury for patent infringement. According to Marvell, the patents cover a specific technique related to read channel detector technology that is not practiced...
Read more...
Marvell is launching a new line of SSD cache accelerators for enterprise storage arrays that it believes could dramatically reduce the cost of deployment and significantly improve performance. The two new devices, dubbed the DragonFly NVRAM and DragonFly NVCache, are meant to solve the same sorts of problems as the consumer-oriented Corsair Cache Accelerators we've reviewed. but on a far larger scale -- and with a lot more firepower. You can't swing a dead cat more than six inches these days without slamming into someone's new cloud service. This is partly due to the reckless enthusiasm of...
Read more...
For better or worse, cloud gaming seems to be the next major "thing" in gaming as a whole. A few years ago, motion gaming was it. Now that we've embraced that (and to some extent, 3D), companies like Sony are investing heavily in the cloud. But it's not just Sony. Marvell and OnLive have teamed up to push the notion one step further. OnLive is utilizing Marvell's Armada 1500 HD Media System-On-Chip to power on-demand gaming in Google TV devices. Looking for company takes on the news? "I believe this is a major breakthrough that demonstrates Google TV's progress in addressing the interactive big...
Read more...
