Marvell, has announced the release of its 1.5 GHz tri-core application processor nick named the- Marvell® ARMADA™ 628. The chips includes a full System-on-a-Chip design (SoC) with high performance designs with features of ARM-compliant CPU cores open heterogeneous, multi-core, applications processor.

According to Marvell Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of Marvell Semiconductor’s Consumer and Computing Business Unit “Marvell has once again set the benchmark for the rest of the industry with the world’s first 1.5 GHz tri-core processor, delivering dual stream 1080p 3D video and 3D graphics performance with quad unified shades for 200 million triangles per second delivered on ultra-low-power, long battery life smartphones and tablets.”

The semiconductors business is bracing itself for a revolution in high performance devices. With the tablet bridging the gap between the phone and the PC, it is becoming increasing prevalent to introduce powerful processors that can deliver on multimedia applications.

Some of the specifications of the Marvell® ARMADA™ 628 can be seen as follows:

  • World’s first “tri-core” application processor
  • Up to 1.5 GHz for the two main cores and 624 MHz for the third low power core
  • “Heterogeneous multiprocessing” with “hardware-based Cache Coherence”
  • 1 MB System Level 2 Cache
  • Platform leading multimedia capabilities, including support for both WMMX2 and NEON acceleration; and a highly optimized pipelined VFPv3 floating point engine
  • Member of the ARMADA family of processors for easy software porting
  • 1080p dual stream 3D video applications (30 FPS, multi-format)
  • Ultimate 3D graphics performance with quad unified shaders for 200 million triangles per second (MT/s)
  • High performance, integrated image signal processor (ISP)
  • Ability to project images on multiple simultaneous displays
  • 2 LCDs
  • 1 HDMI
  • 1 advanced EPD controller
  • Peripherals support: USB 3.0 Superspeed Client, MIPI CSI, MIPI DSI, HDMI with integrated PHY, UniPro, Slimbus, SPMI

Currently the processor has not been released in the market; however the company has released samples for testing.