Marvell may not be a massive player in the smartphone SoC market, but the company’s newly announced 64-bit ARMADA Mobile PXA1936 SoC signals big ambitions. The chip is aimed at the high-end mobile market, putting Qualcomm and Samsung squarely in Marvell’s sights. But does the SoC have what it takes?
The PXA1936 is an octo-core ARM Cortex A53 design, with each core clocked at 1.5GHz. This likely puts performance somewhere around Qualcomm’s recently released octo-core Snapdragon 615 SoC, although we have no idea about graphics performance yet. The chip is essentially a bulked up version of the quad-core 64-bit PXA1928 the company announced earlier in the year.
The SoC also includes some other high-end features, such as support for a 1080p display, 16MP camera, built in video encoding and decoding, and, of-course, any future 64-bit applications that make their way to Android. An energy efficient audio codec is also included, as are other power saving features and an enhanced security processor, but we will have to see if these prove to be major selling points.
The other big feature of this SoC is the modem’s support for 5 different wireless communication types. The 4G LTE modem supports TD-LTE, FDD-LTE, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA and GSM, making it a competitive option with other integrated modem chips, such as those from Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Marvell’s processor is expected to make an appearance in unspecified devices come early 2015, right before Qualcomm’s new high-end Cortex-A57 powered Snapdragon 808 and 810 SoCs arrive. The Marvell SoC matches some of the higher-end 64-bit SoCs available right now, but 2015 looks to be raising the bar a little out of the PXA1936’s reach.
No comments:
Post a Comment