Marvell Armada 628

[Rob Evans]

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...eo-for-smartphones-and-tablets-103606094.html

"Game Changer: Ultra-low power, ultra-high performance ARMADA three-core processor first to feature 3D graphics performance with quad unified shaders for 200 million triangles per second delivered on mobile devices"

Sounds interesting - Marvell have used Vivante before, but this page http://www.vivantecorp.com/p_mvr.html suggests their highest performance IP only reaches 58M tri/sec (39M tri/sec on an LP process).

Any ideas?

 

[Laurent06]

Two possibilities:

1. they don't use a Vivante IP
2. they use 4 Vivante IP's since, according to this page:

Our modular software architecture supports multiple GPU cores with a single driver infrastructure.

and Marvell talks about "quad unified shaders".

 

[rpg.314]

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

Peripherals support: USB 3.0 Superspeed Client

Interesting.

 

[Karoshi]

or
option c) It's a press release. Coke was had (not the liquid one), everybody had fun.

 

[tangey]

Other than that single marketing page that Laurent06 linked to, I can find no other mention of either the Vivante VX series, or vivante multi-core anywhere ,either on vivantes website or elsewhere.

Talk about being modest !

 

[Ailuros]

Any ideas?

Yep. With funky triangle rates floating around left and right it sounds damn familiar to the latest GFLOP/TFLOP craze as in the desktop GPU market. The higher the number the bigger the marketing e-***** and it more than often has nothing to do with any achievable rate.

How do you get from quad unified shaders in an embedded GPU 200M Tris today? Easy the same way you fit an elephant into a mainstream refrigerator: open fridge - squeeze in elephant - close fridge. That easy

If the elephant shouldn't fit apologize and claim a typo. Not many know the difference between vertices and triangles anyway

 

[Arun]

Not related to the 3D core which I don't know about, but the three-core approach is appealing. Other manufacturers already use an ARM9 (Tegra) or Cortex-M3s (2xM3 in OMAP4) for some control when doing things like audio or video, but given the rise of multitasking it's certainly interesting to have a low-leakage CPU that you can keep on much more of the time. Their addition of NEON is also a good idea, and USB3 is very cool (I wonder if Tegra3/OMAP5 will have that, Marvell has more of a history in high-speed peripherals than either after all).

They're a bit behind on the process side of things, but architecturally I'm impressed. I'm not sure how much of a market opportunity they have but congrats to their engineering teams.