First of all: the Armada 510 uses the
Vivante GC600, just see this block diagram:
http://www.marvell.com/files/technologies/armada/Armada510_SoC_block_diagram.jpg
Secondly: I have no idea what the Armada 610 uses. It doesn't fit the GC800 or the discontinued GC500. It doesn't fit Mali. And it doesn't quite fit SGX either. Apparently the 45MTri/s isn't a typo since they repeat it elsewhere, which makes me even more confused. I'm also not aware of any OGL1.1 core with such a high triangle throughput so that can't be it either. Oh well, who cares!
Anyhow GC600 is pretty nice in terms of texture rate, although the shader performance is likely to be slightly less impressive: according to
http://www.ocpip.org/uploads/documents/Vivante_DATE_Slides.20090416.pdf their ALUs are simply Vec4 (presumably MADD) and the GC600 only has one of them. I know we had a thread regarding Vivante's products/die size, but I never contributed to it so I thought I'd do that here
After reading a bit, here are a few ideas on how they achieve that die size compared to SGX or others:
1) Very small shader core; Vec4/probably-not-so-fast-branching vs Scalar/MIMD is quite a difference to say the least. I also doubt they support faster INT8/FP16 ala SGX.
2) TMUs don't support anisotropic filtering or 3D textures (obviously cubemaps though). Who knows what their subpixel accuracy is among other things.
3) Their antialiasing technique is described as "Patented anti-aliasing algorithm uses one-fourth the memory and processing power to achieve the same quality as multi-sample anti-aliasing" - aka, flee for the exits? I don't know, that kind of claim (especially on an IMR!) just scares me a bit but who knows maybe it's just overzealous marketing and the solution is actually rvery easonable.
4) "Optional dedicated 2D unit" - I guess their numbers don't include that, so if you want better API suport and/or save power consumption, add a GC200/300/350? Not clear what happens if you don't and how comparable it is to competitive GPU in native 2D support.
It's not obvious to me that Snapdragon is the best comparison because it has an integrated baseband. Certainly they will compete quite a bit, but it'll likely compete even more so against NVIDIA/Samsung/TI SoCs (and a whole bunch of others for the CE chips). It would be very interesting to compare the CPU core with Snapdragon's though, yeah. Obviously all this once again makes Marvell a very real competitor in the application processor business, but there's still one big question...
When did/will those SoCs start sampling? From what I understand, the Armada 510 is the last to sample whereas the others have actually been sampling for some time; although it's so unclear it could actually be the reverse, heh. Anyway assuming that's the case, 55nm isn't very impressive and they might struggle to compete against OMAP4/Tegra2. It is still my understanding based on what I heard that the latter started sampling in Q2 in its 40nm/single-core variant, so devices would probably be available only a little bit later than the 55nm 610 - assuming, of course, that NVIDIA (and their partners) don't screw it up again