Marvell (News - Alert), a dealer in the development of storage, communications and consumer silicon systems, released a family of mobile application processors called Armada aimed at mobile devices like handheld or portable computers and the product line consists of Armada 100, Armada 500, Armada 600 and Armada 1000, each designed to address a different segment depending on the performance, thermal and power requirements.

 

Now, the company has deployed Vivante’s GC-Series Graphics Processing Units in these mobile application processors to enable the processors to offer breakthrough levels of performance and image quality for high performance integrated graphics processing at HD 1080p resolutions.

 

Vivante officials said that the company has been working with Marvell and their customers along with the application and middleware ecosystem to bring an immersive multimedia user experience to a new class of consumer devices.

 

Additionally, Marvell officials said that the products from their ARMADA processors will be power efficient because they are built on the new 55 nanometer process. Now with Vivante’s GPU technology now combined with their CPU power, they will be able to deliver PC-class performance and quality at HD 1080p for applications like Adobe Flash technology, Microsoft Silverlight, Blu-ray functionality and engaging 3D games across a wide variety of platforms including Google Android (News - Alert), Linux, Maemo, Ubuntu, Microsoft Windows Embedded CE, Windows Mobile and China Mobile's OMS.

 

Vivante’s GPUs not only offer outstanding visual graphics quality and performance to enhance media SoC, but also their efficiency in system resource usage, die area and power consumption will also help chipset makers design world-class portable multimedia IC products.

 

Analysts have indicated that the market embedded GPUs is expanding rapidly with smart phones, mobile Internet devices and media server/set-top box applications creating similar market dynamics to the PC graphics card market explosion a decade earlier and in order to stand out from the competition companies have to deliver performance, cost and robust API support.

 

Marvell recently announced support for Wi-Fi direct standard and unveiled eco-friendly, powerful plug computing with SheevaPlug.