Oct 19 2009
Armada by Marvell – New ARM based application processors
Marvell has been well known for its communications, interface and embedded controller chips. They currently make about 1 Billion chips a year, and about 65% of them have at least one ARM core in them. Based on this expertise, leveraging their ARM architecture license and the custom processor experience from the Xscale processor group acquired several years back, Marvell has created a new ARM based application processor family called Armada.
These processors are targeted at the new non-PC based computing and connectivity applications that are growing in the CE, industrial and communication industries. The ARM processor already enjoys a 98% penetration in the mobile phone market, and are also entrenched in the growing ebook, smart peripheral and ubiquitous computing application in the connected living room. There are 4 initial members of the Armada family the Armada 100, 500, 600 and 1000. The Armada 100, 500, and 1000 are made using a standard process “G” which are targeted toward high speed (up to 1.2GHz operating freq), low active power, DDR2 memory interface and multiple power down modes. The Armada 600 is made using a standard “LP” process option which is targeted to low leakage, long standby power applications and a dual DDR2/DDR3 low power memory interface.
In order to address low power application with high performance, the ARM5 (single in A100 and dual in A1000) and ARM7 cores are supplemented with control logic to offload video and graphics to a separate MMX2 co-processor which is more power efficient for those applications than fully powering up the main processor. The processors have HD video decoders (A600 has both encode and decode) as well as full connectivity interfaces. This connectivity includes wireless, SATA, PCIE, USB, 1G ethernet, and HDMI. The processor family share a common code base over them and support Android, Linux, Windows Embedded CE6, Adobe Flash Lite and also 1080p HD. The video processing can support multiple displays.
The Armada 100 is targeted at low cost “smart device” applications such as eBooks, digital photo frames, IP surveillance camera, VOIP terminals and handsets. The Armada 500 is targeted at Smartbooks, MIDs, Netbooks, thin client applications and industrial control. The Armada 600 is targeted at smart phones, point of sale devices, handheld multimedia and video targeted MIDs. The Armada 1000 is targeted for line cord application in the digital living room, bringing web enablement and connectivity to televisions, blu-ray players, set top boxes and digital media adapters (DMAs). The Armada 100, 500 and 1000 devices have been sampling since earlier this year and will be showing end products with these components at CES in Jan 2010. The Armada 600 (Low Power) will be sampling soon for end products that will be showing in early 2010.
The new architecture incorporates high speed connectivity, HD video control and decoding, peripheral connectivity and an OS agnostic environment for application development in a single product. Figure 1 shows the SOC architecture of the A510 product.
Fig 1 - Armada510 SoC block diagram
This new direction, of application for a system around a compute core, has also been advocated by Intel with their Atom based SOC model and with MIPs based cores from several vendors. Marvell however is not just talking about it, they have delivered the products and are in the process of ramping production on the product line to address the market needs for 2010, not just the 2012 peak market year. The development platform for the Armada 510 chip is shown in figure 2.
Figure 2 Armada 510 Platform Block Diagram
PC
Whatever is an ARM5 core?
With respect to the ARM5 – Marvell has a core processor based ont eh ARM knows as the Sheeva processor. The ARM5 and the ARM7 in the article actually refer to the Sheeva ARMv5 processor core and the Sheeva ARMv7 processor core.