Items tagged with Marvell
Up until today, there had not existed a solid state driver controller that takes advantage of the PCI Express 5.0 specification. That just changed, however, with Marvell's introduction of the Bravera SC5, the industry's first SSD controller to support PCIe 5.0 and NVMe 1.4b, to potentially double the performance of PCIe 4.0 SSDs. That claim comes by way of the bandwidth that PCIe 5.0 affords. In terms of raw speed, PCIe 5.0 doubles the transfer rate from PCIe 4.0 from 16GT/s to 32GT/s (that's GigaTransfers per second). That translates to around 4GB/s per lane, so in a x16 configuration, we're looking at around 64GB/s of unidirectional bandwidth, or 128GB/s. No consumer platform supports PCIe...
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Most of the security vulnerabilities we write about at HotHardware fortunately won't affect the vast majority of readers. Either these exploits require user interaction to kick-start, or you have to be of particular interest as a target for someone to go through the effort of executing more complex attacks against you or your devices. But then there are those vulnerabilities that could impact any of us at any time, and worse, can be exploited with the ultimate of ease. Embedi is a security firm that focuses on embedded devices and operating systems (hence the name). Through its research efforts, the company discovered some serious issues with the firmware of the widely-used ThreadX RTOS...
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In the world of integrated circuits, there are some major players that build chips that we use every day may not even realize it. Companies like Broadcom and Qualcomm make integrated circuits that find their way inside the laptops, computers, and smart devices that we use constantly. A name you might not think about being in the same league as those two major players is NVIDIA. Many still think of NVIDIA mostly as a video card maker, and while that might be what gamers like best, there is more to Team Green than video cards and GPUs. NVIDIA has now overtaken MediaTek to become the third largest IC design company in the entire world. Directly ahead of NVIDIA is Qualcomm in second place with Broadcom...
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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 Express. The latest high-end solid state drives connect to a system using the PCI Express interface,...
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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 Quanta. Eremenko also confirmed that the there would be two form-factors for the Ara smartphones...
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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 here use the same controller and NAND as the M550 series, though ADATA takes a few steps to help...
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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 here use the same controller and NAND as the M550 series, though ADATA takes a few steps to help...
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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 market and it’s a very meaningful effort. I am very proud of our joint collaboration with Samsung...
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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 that you can use via an iOS or Android app. The device runs on a Marvell ARMADA 1500 Plus SoC...
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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 of Smart TVs with Google services. Marvell is proud to team up with Google and ecosystem partners...
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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 Western products and multiple Chinese markets... Vivante: Challenging the Status Quo In Mobile GPUs...
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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 design wins both in Western products and multiple Chinese markets. Vivante got started in 2004 and...
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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 provide instantaneous and seamless access to applications such as YouTube, Netflix and other cloud-based...
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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 (yellow) and a low-power 1.35V 512MB DDR3L SDRAM chip, also from Micron (green). iFixit Chromecast...
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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 by any Marvell chips. "Marvell and MSI strongly believe the theoretical methods described in these...
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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 marketing departments who've fallen all over themselves to rebrand the exact same products with a...
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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 screen for any type of live content. We are thrilled to collaborate with OnLive in transforming any...
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What's an SSD without a controller? A reckless SSD. Just kidding. But in all seriousness, these controllers are vital to the performance and uptime of a solid state drive, and Marvell's delivering a new kid on the block for use with what could end up being your next unit. The company this week announced mass deployment of the 88SS9187 SATA controller, a 6Gb/sec unit that includes on-chip RAID functionality, an enhanced ECC engine, improved NAND control logic and SATA Rev. 3.1 compliance. It's engineered to meet the news of both consumers and enterprise users, and the company states that a significant number of high-profile SSD manufacturers are set to deploy Marvell's newest solution immediately,...
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Prior to the start of this year's CES 2012 show, a number of OEMs were showcasing their latest products at various hotel venues throughout the bustling city of Las Vegas, Nevada. Of course OCZ Technology was first on our list of suites to visit, in an effort to satiate our need for blinding storage speed -- and as usual, Team OCZ did not disappoint. This year, it was actually pretty surprising how many announcements the company was rolling out, from new co-developed solutions with Marvell, to acquisitions and the second coming of their Indilinx Everest controller, dubbed Everest 2....
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Prior to the start of this year's CES 2012 show, a number of OEMs were showcasing their latest products at various hotel venues throughout the bustling city of Las Vegas, Nevada. Of course OCZ Technology was first on our list of suites to visit, in an effort to satiate our need for blinding storage speed -- and as usual, Team OCZ did not disappoint. This year, it was actually pretty surprising how many announcements the company was rolling out, from new co-developed solutions with Marvell, to acquisitions and the second coming of their Indilinx Everest controller, dubbed Everest 2. The OCZ Indilinx Everest 2 SSD controller is the second SATA-based platform controller to roll out of OCZ...
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Marvell is doing some magnificent things in the storage space lately. Hot on the heels of co-developing the "Kilimanjaro" native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform with OCZ (demonstrated via OCZ's new Z-Drive R5, which we covered the announcement here), Marvell on Monday unveiled its 88SE9230 6Gbps SATA controller powered by HyperDuo embedded processor technology. This new controller replaces Marvell's previous one and offers twice the performance, capacity, and scalability as before. What's neat about this controller is that it supports up to four ports for SSD and HDD connectivity, and if you hook up both kinds of drives, it will intelligently manage your data so that you receive up to...
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What if you had a mini, power-efficient computer that smiled at your when it was functioning properly, and frowned when something needed a tweak? It'd sure be better than your current troubleshooting setup, we're certain. Marvell announced today at CES their new "Classroom 3.0" technology, featuring an ARMADA-powered SMILE Plug and a partnership with One Laptop Per Child. The SMILE Plug computer is the starlet of the show, listed as the first plug development kit designed to turn a traditional classroom into a highly interactive learning environment. Designed to engage students in critical reasoning and problem solving, the SMILE Plug creates a "micro cloud" within a classroom that is completely...
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