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Marvell Embraces Earth Day: Driving Greener, Eco-Friendly Embedded Enterprise Applications

New Gigahertz-Class ARMADA 310 Processor, Sub-One Watt Combines High Performance, Extensive Feature Set with Markedly Lower Power

Santa Clara, California (April 22, 2010) – Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL), a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, today announced a new addition to the ARMADA™ family of application processors in honor of Earth Day 2010 – the Marvell® ARMADA 310. The new System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is designed to deliver scalable performance of up to 1GHz while consuming less than 1 Watt – a striking industry benchmark for the enterprise application developer community. The ARMADA 310 opens doors to new greener embedded enterprise applications with gigahertz-class performance to muscle computing horsepower for digital homes and small and remote office applications, as well as for new intelligent solutions for Plug Computing, medical, financial and point-of-sale (POS) markets. The advanced ARMADA 310 offers designers the opportunity to develop high performance, power-efficient green systems with smaller form factors for a variety of peripherals such as routers, microservers, dongles, PC cards, industrial and medical systems.

"With the ongoing demand for sustainable enterprise developments and Marvell's commitment to advocate and advance the development of energy efficient green technology, the groundbreaking ARMADA 310 sets itself apart from competitors with its enterprise performance features and lower power capabilities," said Dr. Simon Milner, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Business Unit at Marvell Semiconductor Inc. "Embedded application developers need smarter processors capable of delivering high levels of performance while consuming lower power, the new ARMADA 310 is designed to do just that - the solutions offers a variety of performance features while meeting the community's demand to lower carbon footprint."

The ARMADA 310 offers scalable performance from 600MHz to 1GHz and the ability to power down as low as 700mW. To help maximize bandwidth, reduce power consumption and drive down system cost, the new SoC features an on-chip 16-bit DDR2/3 interface. The highly integrated IC also drives down bill of material (BOM) costs by adding a wide variety of communications options including two PCI-express bus interfaces, two Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) MACs, a USB 2.0 compliant port with an integrated PHY that can serve as a peripheral or host, and an embedded 16-bit LCD controller.

"Marvell is recognized as a leading developer of CPUs running the ARM instruction set that reach a broad array of markets and applications," said Tony Massimini, Chief of Technology at Semico Research Corp. "By integrating extensive connectivity capabilities into a highly scalable ARM-based SoC, the ARMADA 310 offers designers the opportunity to create small-form factor, high-performance, devices that easily link to other systems and outside networks."

The CPU core on the ARMADA 310 was developed by Marvell and is ARMv5TE compliant. It features a four-way, set-associative L1 16 KB I-cache /16-KB D-cache and a 256-KB, unified four-way, set-associative L2 cache. To maximize throughput the chip uses an innovative on-chip crossbar architecture that enables concurrent transactions among multiple units.

Besides the features mentioned above, the new Armada 310 offers:

  • Two SATA 2.0 ports with integrated PHYs
  • Variety of boot options (NAND Flash, DDR2/3, etc)
  • Audio support with two TDM Channels
  • Network security engine capable of supporting various encryption algorithms
  • Variety of interfaces including, SDIO/MMC, NAND flash, SPI, two TWSI, and two UARTs
  • DMA/XOR engine with four channels
  • RTC and thermal sensor

Packaging and availability

To help minimize end product footprint, the new green SoC comes in a highly compact 15 x 15-mm Flip-Chip Ball Grid Array (FCBGA). The ARMADA 310 is available immediately and sells for under $15 in 10Ku quantities.

ARMADA Family

The ARMADA family of application processors sets a new standard by offering PC-class performance enabled by Marvell's patented CPU technology. Designed from the ground-up, Marvell's best-in-class CPUs for the ARM instruction set are at the heart of each chip. Unlike other comparable, commercially available products in the industry, Marvell CPUs deliver higher performance and lower power dissipation while providing full software compatibility to all ARM-based applications. The ARMADA 300 series offers more than 2.0 GHz processing horsepower in a sub 2W power envelope for the entire System on Chip – a level of performance never before seen with this class of processor – and the flexibility, interfaces and price points that fit the needs of today's digital economy.

About Marvell

Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is a world leader in the development of storage, communications, and consumer silicon solutions. The company's diverse product portfolio includes switching, transceiver, communications controller, wireless, and storage solutions that power the entire communications infrastructure including enterprise, metro, home, and storage networking. As used in this release, the terms "company" and "Marvell" refer to Marvell Technology Group Ltd. and its subsidiaries. For more information, visit http://www.marvell.com.

Marvell and the M logo are registered trademarks of Marvell and/or its affiliates. ARMADA is a trademark of Marvell and/or its affiliates.  Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.